Vito dealt her a flashing smile of all-male satisfaction. ‘Console yourself with the thought that if you hadn’t looked at me like that, you wouldn’t be here now. You dug your own grave, cara.’
With a superhuman effort Ashley took advantage of his loosened hold and, dragging her hands free, leapt off the bed. Snatching up the dress she had earlier discarded, she fled the room. The rest of the apartment was unhelpfully in darkness and she skidded in the direction of the hall, uncertain of her bearings.
Vito caught her hand and in her determination to escape she tore her fingers free so violently that she fell back against the wall. ‘You’re out of control!’ she gasped strickenly as he trapped her there, one hand squarely planted on either side of her head in the depths of her hair.
‘And so are you,’ he breathed unsteadily. ‘Exactly the way I like you.’
Scarcely able to believe that this was happening to her, Ashley attempted to raise her knee, but a hard thigh pinned the recalcitrant limb in place and simultaneously Vito brought his mouth crashing down on hers.
It was like a naked flame thrown on tinder-dry straw; a complete and uncontrollable conflagration. As his tongue hungrily probed the moist recesses of her mouth, a hoarse moan of pleasure was forced from her. Her taut body went into meltdown; between one moment and the next all rational thought ceased as though he had thrown a switch. She braced her hands on his shoulders and answered that kiss with complete abandon.
Time had no meaning. All that existed was a fierce world of almost unbearable sensation which wiped out everything else. He was lifting her up to his level, burying his face in the ripe swell of her aching breasts until he found a taut nipple to tease with his mouth and feelings, physical feelings that had been held in too tight for too long suddenly exploded in a fiery gush of response. Her fingers dug into the springy depths of his black hair and she wanted to scream with the power of what she was experiencing. Vito choked out a curse as he cannoned off a door and then he found her mouth again, feeding her desire with the overwhelming force of his own. He didn’t break that contact for a second as he brought her down heavily on a bed somewhere in the darkness.
He was struggling out of his shirt and the assistance he got was negligible as her hands wandered in a helpless need for reacquaintance over the broad expanse of his chest, fingertips skating through the dark whorls of hair and down to the smoother skin at his lean waist. He felt hot, as if he was burning up, but the same flames were in her and she was lost, irretrievably lost in the scent and the feel and the touch of him.
Abruptly he wrenched back from her and ripped off the remainder of his clothes. He muttered something in Italian and then he groaned, ‘How the hell do you do this to me? It wasn’t supposed to be like this.’
Cooler air briefly washed her damp skin and for a split-second a shard of reason almost returned, but, before the nebulous thought could form, Vito was back in her arms with a vengeance. She gasped as long fingers slid between her thighs and found the moist centre of her desire, cried out and arched her back beneath the hot onslaught of his mouth on her taut breasts.
‘Tell me how you feel,’ he demanded between clenched teeth as he moved over her, his hands rough on her thighs, his body a heavy but blessed weight on hers.
‘Vito, please… oh, God, please… don’t stop.’ She was at fever pitch, her entire being concentrated on a razor edge of unbearable need. She could feel him, hot and hard and ready, and she couldn’t wait, was terrified he might make her wait, because if he didn’t drive her over that edge she thought she might die from frustration.
He took her like an invading army, ruthless in conquest. The sheer power of his first thrust forced a cry of pain from her dry lips but pain became intolerable pleasure within seconds. Her hips writhed beneath his as he drove into her in long shuddering strokes, his skin slippery with perspiration against hers. She moved to the heated rhythm he set, abandoned and driven by the most intense excitement of all, and then suddenly every muscle clenched and she was moaning with the ecstasy of fulfilment, rawly erotic shock waves spreading out from the very centre of her body to drain her momentarily of all thought and all movement. With a groan of raw satisfaction Vito subsided on her, spent and satiated. Instinctively she wrapped her arms round him and almost instantly drifted off to sleep.
When she surfaced, it was like waking up to a living hell. Lights were on, harsh and glaring, and the first things she saw when she opened her eyes were the photographs on the cabinet by the bed. Carina, smiling from a silver frame. And Carina in Vito’s arms, punch-drunk with happiness in one of those informal but intimate studies that just might have been taken on a honeymoon. Ashley’s stomach twisted and turned over sickly as if she had gone down too fast in a lift. She turned away and met Vito’s shuttered dark gaze. Almost fully dressed, he was shrugging a broad shoulder into the jacket of a navy pinstripe suit. He looked heartbreakingly handsome and soul-destroyingly remote. If he was feeling anything, he wasn’t showing it, and that ability of his to shut everything out tortured her at a moment when she felt sick with self-hatred and humiliation. Trembling all over, she shut her eyes, struggling fiercely against her mind’s determination to replay the last few hours. It would happen soon enough: the self-examination, the questions that had no welcome answers. But not now, the little voice in her head pleaded, not now… in front of him.
‘I think I should leave.’ There was no emotion whatsoever in the announcement, except that some sixth sense told her that Vito couldn’t wait to get away. She pressed her cheek into the pillow. ‘Can I leave too?’ she whispered, and it sounded as if she was begging, and for the first time in her life she really didn’t care.
‘It was inevitable that this would happen.’ ‘You made it happen,’ she condemned. ‘We made it happen,’ he countered harshly. ‘I didn’t plan it. I intended to wait until after the wedding.’
A near-hysterical laugh escaped her and she bit down so hard on her tongue that it bled. She never had been able to cope with Vito when he froze, and he wasn’t about to let her go. Vito’s ancestors had been loan sharks since the Middle Ages. Something for nothing was not a concept that had figured largely in his upbringing. Vito would take what he wanted from her regardless of the cost. He would pick her apart as he had done over dinner and then fall like a vulture on the pitiful remnants that remained. He had done it twice already and the poisonous taste of defeat was smashing her into pieces.
‘You should run a little account book, stamp each page every time I-‘
‘Don’t!’ he raked at her with sudden rawness. ‘It wasn’t planned!’
‘No?’ She cast him a fleeting look because she just couldn’t bring herself to face a head-on collision. ‘Over dinner you smash me up. Then you trail me to the opera. Then you trail me out of the opera. Then you offer me brandy and a little bit of sympathy and then you… and then you… you-‘
‘Do you think I’m proud of what I did tonight? Do you think I’m proud that I can’t keep my hands off you?’ The ice had cracked. Tense as a jungle cat about to spring, he flung the demands at her with lancing ferocity.
‘Why don’t you throw some money on the bed?’ Ashley whispered strickenly. ‘Isn’t that what you do with whores?’
‘You are not a whore!’
‘You said I was,’ she persisted stubbornly.
Vito flung up both hands in a gesture of raging frustration. ‘Dio, I was jealous, so jealous that I wouldn’t listen to reason. I accept now that you were with Tim today and that that stupid bruise wasn’t what I assumed it was, but at the time I believed you’d been with another man!’