‘I’ll never love you again! Do you hear me?’ she launched at him stridently, recklessly.
Disorientating, a brilliant smile softened the fierce line of his mouth. ‘I should corner you at least twice a day and make you lose your head. By the end of a week, I’d know you inside-out… every secret… every thought. So, you believed that you loved me in your way, if not in mine, four years ago?’
Aghast at what she had conceded in temper, she began to swing away from him. ‘You’re not going anywhere.’ A powerful hand intercepted her before she could move.
In the grip of absolute desperation, she lifted her arm and aimed a hefty slap at him. Vito tipped his head back and unbalanced her with remarkable agility, strong hands clamping round her waist to push her back on to the grass. Finding herself unexpectedly in a supine and far more vulnerable position, Ashley made a violent attempt to dislodge him. Vito laughed uproariously and pinned her flat, trapping her flailing hands in both of his. ‘Uh-uh-uh!’ he scolded. ‘You are in a panic, aren’t you? Hit and run. The last resort in your repertoire.’
Like those of a tiger cub at bay, her green eyes were on fire with defiance. ‘Why are you doing this to me?’
Momentarily a wry look of acceptance seemed to cloud his unashamed amusement. ‘I can’t seem to get close without getting physical. So be it, cara. All your space just took a hike. I’ve withdrawn a privilege which didn’t seem to be gaining me any ground.’
Her heart hammering crazily against her ribs, she gazed up into the implacable dark features suspended mere inches from her, suddenly starkly conscious of the scanty nature of her bikini. Still holding her hands flat with his, he took her mouth with all the savage hunger of a male who felt he had been exercising an unnatural and unappreciated brand of restraint.
A stab of raw sensation fired in the pit of her stomach. His tongue penetrated deeply between her lips, fanning the fire into a positive blaze. He went on kissing her until her lips were bruised and red and her bones were melted honey beneath her burning skin. Only then did he pull away and brush aside the bikini bra with impatient fingers, immediately bending his dark head to rub his mouth erotically across a taut pink nipple.
‘I want you unbearably,’ he confided. ‘I want you so much that when I take you it will be like dying and being reborn.’
She moaned, her head thrown back as his hands cupped her breasts in a fierce possession. He rolled over and, catching her clenched fingers, drew them down to his taut, flat stomach, pressing them against the button on his waistband. ‘I want everything the way it was,’ he admitted raggedly. ‘I want to wake up at dawn with you making love to me.’
‘No,’ she whispered breathlessly, vivid sexual imagery from memories she had buried deep living again inside her mind. But her body was already betraying her. The need to touch him as intimately as he touched her was a torment of desire fighting the last remnants of her control. Theirs had never been a one-sided loving. Dimly it occurred to her that in bed they had been true partners, neither one of them giving or taking more than the other.
He claimed her parted lips in a glancingly sweet caress that was a torment to senses already roused to a frightening pitch of excitement. In an unashamed admission of need, he pushed her hand against the hard bulge of his manhood, constrained by the unyielding denim, and the hunger that surged up inside her was uncontrolled. ‘This… this I will have,’ he breathed unsteadily, ‘though you deny me all else.’
He was trembling, the sheen of sweat on his smooth golden skin testifying to the extremity of his arousal, and she knew then with a wild flash of satisfaction that he was no more in control than she was. But that wasn’t what made her move closer and send her lips whispering over the flat male nipple she discovered amid the black, silky whorls of hair clouding his broad chest. That wasn’t what made her skate teasing fingers across his unbelievably taut abdomen and feel him jerk and groan beneath her caresses. No, what drove her was the all-encompassing knowledge that in this he was hers, absolutely and completely hers in a way that he would never be any other woman’s, and that was in that moment as powerful and seductive as the strength of her own desire.
With every inhibition released, she became a creature of alluring abandon, glorying in her own freedom. When the seducer became the seduced, the lines that had once divided them blurred until there was nothing between them but a mutually exclusive passion that burned out of control throughout what remained of the daylight hours.
It was as though they had never been apart, but even in the past their loving had never been so passionate or intense. When he finally settled between her thighs, she reached up to cup his damp cheekbones and claimed a tempestuous kiss as her right; those lines had faded altogether. As lost as she in the grip of that voracious desire, he shuddered and groaned deep in his throat in response and then he entered her wildly, deeply, and proceeded to make love to her with a thoroughness that exceeded her most colourful fantasies.
When it was over, she lay with her head against his chest, listening to his heartbeat still racing against her, gloriously at ease and at peace in the imprisoning circle of his arms. It was like dying and being reborn, she thought weakly, and afterwards it was like waking up in paradise, so intense was the release from her own body. For the first time she felt really close to him, so close that the first fingerings of alarm entered paradise and she tensed.
Vito tightened his hold on her instantly, smoothing a caressing and confident hand over her small head as if he were soothing a restive child. His touch felt tender, gentle, and was extraordinarily comforting. She remembered that, in all her life, the only time she had ever felt safe was in his arms.
‘Maybe at the end of the year I might consider tempting your kid brother with another Ferrari.’
The illusion of paradise shattered into shards that pierced her flesh in all the most tender places. Like a madwoman, she found herself wanting to weep and shriek and tear at her hair in a painful ecstasy of despair. She couldn’t go back. She couldn’t go forward either. The past would always intervene. Vito had the forgiving qualities of a Cesare Borgia. And he would stand by the last letter of that unholy agreement.
CHAPTER NINE
‘IF YOU were a feline, you’d purr like a motor, mia cara.’ Planting a teasing kiss to her brow, Vito straightened from the bed. Fully dressed and emanating waves of disgusting energy, he smiled down at her. ‘I suppose you won’t consider stirring yourself and having breakfast with me for a change?’
‘No.’ Her answer was muffled by the sheet and she was holding herself still as a statue, too well aware that the moment she attempted to sit up would also be the moment when she was most likely to throw up.
He chuckled and strolled across the room with all the lean, lazy grace of a hunting animal, replete after a good meal. ‘I’ll see you later.’
The last time she hadn’t been this sick. The doctor at the hospital had said that her lack of sickness might well have been a sign that her pregnancy was unstable. The assurance had been small comfort four years ago, and at that rate this dreadful nausea she was presently suffering ought to be an indication of the most stable pregnancy of all time!
Priya appeared with a dry biscuit and a cup of aromatic herb tea. It was very hard to eat lying flat but Ashley did her best. The older woman muttered worriedly about her needing to see a doctor and Ashley ignored the advice. This morning scene had become routine ever since Priya found her being violently ill in the bathroom, and with a little bit of quick thinking Ashley had turned her into a partner in collusion to conceal her condition from everyone else in the household. She had lost a baby before, she had forced herself to confide. This time she didn’t want to raise Vito’s hopes unnecessarily, she had said. Priya had understood such a motive. In her culture men were to be protected at all times from upsetting experiences. That was a woman’s duty.