by Lynne Graham
‘Where do you sleep?’ he asked.
‘This is the only bedroom,’ Isla admitted, sidestepping the question. ‘There used to be two but my uncle knocked them into one after he found out that they couldn’t have children. He felt the empty bedroom next door was a constant reminder they didn’t need.’
The arctic chill in the air cooled Alissandru’s face. ‘There’s no heating up here,’ he remarked abstractedly, wondering how on earth anyone could live with such a privation in the depth of winter.
‘No,’ she conceded. ‘But I can light the fire for you,’ she offered, biting her lip when she saw him struggle to kill a shiver and recalling the heat of the Sicilian climate, as foreign to her as extreme cold appeared to be to him.
‘I would be very grateful if you did,’ Alissandru said with unusual humility.
Isla thought ruefully of all the to-ing and fro-ing up the stairs carting logs and coal and stiffened her flagging resolve. He was a guest and she had been brought up to believe that, if it was possible, guests should be pampered.
‘I’ll go for a shower...if there’s hot water?’ Alissandru studied her enquiringly, recognising that there was nothing he could take for granted in such a poor household.
‘Lots of hot water,’ Isla assured him more cheerfully. ‘But you have no luggage so let me see if there’s something of my uncle’s that you could borrow,’ she added, heading for the chest of drawers by the window.
‘That won’t be necessary,’ Alissandru asserted, his nostrils flaring with distaste at the thought of wearing another man’s clothing.
‘My uncle wouldn’t mind and he’s tall like you,’ Isla argued, misinterpreting his response and assuming that he had sufficient manners not to want to be a nuisance. She rifled through several drawers and produced a pair of worn jeans and a husky sweater that looked as though it had seen better days before the last world war, settling both items on the bed. ‘You’ll be more comfortable in these than in that suit. I’ll go downstairs and sort out something for dinner.’
‘Thank you...’ Alissandru forced out the words. ‘Considering what I said when I arrived, you’ve been surprisingly kind.’
A delicate coppery brow raised as she spun back to look at him. ‘I don’t think you consider what you say very often,’ she admitted with a sudden spontaneous smile of amusement that lit up her heart-shaped face like a glorious sunrise. ‘And you’re completely out of your depth in this environment, which makes me more forgiving. I was just as ill at ease in your home in Sicily.’
‘Dio mio... I thought we made you welcome.’
A tide of colour rose up beneath her fair skin, making Alissandru study her in fascination and move several steps closer to stare down at her.
‘Oh, my goodness, of course you did. I stayed in a wonderful bedroom and the food and everything was incredible,’ Isla babbled, belatedly conscious that she might have sounded rude and unappreciative of his hospitality and alarmingly aware of his proximity because he was so very tall and powerfully built. ‘But it wasn’t my world and I was a fish out of water there. I’d never even been abroad before, never seen a house like yours except on television...you know, everything in your home was unfamiliar...and rather unnerving, to be honest.’
Alissandru scanned the tiny pulse flickering wildly just above her delicate collarbone and he wanted to put his mouth there. He was convinced that her heart was hammering out the same fast nervous beat because naturally she recognised the heightened sexual awareness that laced the atmosphere between them. Of course, she did, he told himself cynically. She was twenty-two, no longer a teenager, precocious or otherwise, and an adult woman in every sense of the word. With that thought driving him, he lifted a hand to tilt up her chin, gazing down into startled dark blue eyes and the surge of pink suddenly brightening her cheeks. She blushed. When had he last met a woman who blushed? It was simply that fair skin of hers, doubtless telegraphing the existence of the same erotic thoughts that were currently controlling him.
Would she, wouldn’t she? Alissandru asked himself but he rather thought the answer to the suggestion of sex would be yes. He always got the answer yes from women, couldn’t remember when he had last been rejected, and the chemistry between him and Isla Stewart was indisputable. He didn’t like it, indeed he despised it, but the same powerful drive that had hardened him to steel with arousal was what kept the human race alive and it was appallingly hard to resist for a man unaccustomed to having to deny such a normal urge. He pictured her spread across the bed with its ugly patchwork duvet set...pale and lush and pink and freckled? Sex would be one useful way of keeping warm and it would provide entertainment into the bargain, Alissandru rationalised with ease.
Alissandru slowly lowered his handsome dark head, giving her time to retreat. But Isla was frozen into immobility, disturbingly preoccupied by the tightening of her nipples and the low pulse of heat thrumming at the centre of her body. Once or twice before she had experienced such glimmerings of awareness with other men but the attraction had always vanished the moment they actually touched her, convincing her that the fertile scope of a woman’s imagination had to explain a lot of encounters that were later regretted. Yet now, when her every cautious instinct with his sex urged her to back away from Alissandru, sheer curiosity kept her where she stood because she wanted, inexplicably needed, to know if it would be the same with him.
And he kissed her cheek and her temples and brushed his mouth with astonishing gentleness across hers in an exploratory sortie. ‘Tell me now if you want me to stop.’
Isla quivered inside her skin, entrapped by feelings she had never felt before, her body alight from those fleeting caresses, the sudden heat in her pelvis making her squirm. And the scent of him that close... Oh, dear heaven, how did she describe that faint evocative scent of cologne and musky masculinity that made her positively quiver with powerful awareness?
‘Do it,’ she heard herself urge wantonly, and the breathless sound of her own voice shook her.
With a smothered laugh, Alissandru crushed her parted lips beneath his own and sensual shock engulfed her because with one passionate kiss he inflamed her, and her hands lifted to curve round his neck to steady legs that had turned bendy as straws. He scooped her up against him with a strength that initially disconcerted and then, ultimately, thrilled her. His tongue darted into her mouth, flicked, dallied, twinned with hers and extraordinary sensation exploded throughout her body, switching it onto an altogether higher plane of response. A choked little sound escaped low in her throat, and he set her down and stepped back from her, so aroused by that hoarse little noise she had made in the back of her throat that he had to call a halt.
‘I need that shower. I’ve been travelling all day, gioia mia,’ Alissandru intoned thickly, hot golden eyes locked to her flushed and embarrassed face. ‘Now I look forward to the evening ahead with anticipation.’
And with that unanswerable assumption that Isla knew full well that she had encouraged, he vanished into the bathroom. Her bare feet slapped down the stairs in a hasty retreat and she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror at the foot, hair a messy bonfire of curls, her face hot enough to fry eggs on.
Why had she encouraged him? A foolish thing to do when he had to stay the night and was the kind of man accustomed to easy, casual sex. At the wedding, Tania had gossiped about Alissandru’s many affairs and even though Isla knew she shouldn’t have listened, she had because at the age of sixteen she had been mesmerised by his looks and commanding charismatic presence. But she was twenty-two now, she reminded herself ruefully, and supposed to be beyond such silliness. Even so, she couldn’t lie to herself. When the opportunity had presented itself, she had grabbed at it and him, desperate to know what it would feel like when a man of his smooth sophistication and high-voltage sensuality kissed her. And now she knew and she also knew it would’ve been better had she not found out.
He knew how
to kiss—he really, really knew how to kiss—but of course they weren’t going to take it any further. She was related to Tania and he had hated her sister, it seemed, as much as her sister had hated him. No, nothing more would happen, she told herself, striving to feel relief at that conviction instead of shamelessly disappointed. As Tania had once said, her kid sister needed to get out there and find a life, but Tania had been so much more confident and experienced, freely admitting that she much preferred the company of men to women.
Isla, however, had been raised with Victorian values that tripped her up when she tried to fit into the real world. Most of the men she had met or dated had expected sex the first night, and those that hadn’t demanded sex as though it was a right hadn’t appealed enough to her for her to experiment. And then there had been her off-putting first experience of male sexual urges, she conceded, recalling in disgust the older man who had followed her up to Tania’s bedroom and cornered her at that Sicilian wedding. Ill equipped to deal with such an incident back then, she had been frightened and revolted when he’d tried to touch her where he shouldn’t have and that episode had, for years, made her very wary of being alone with men.
She had stayed a virgin more from lack of temptation than for any other reason, however, hoping and trusting that eventually the right guy would come along. But her brain knew very well that Alissandru Rossetti would never be that guy. He had hated her sister and was clearly predisposed to be prejudiced against Isla as well. Alissandru would be the last man alive likely to offer Tania’s kid sister a relationship.
Apart from anything else, Alissandru didn’t have relationships with women. He wasn’t looking for one special woman or commitment. He wasn’t interested in settling down. Catching herself up on that revealing thought train with a mortified wince, Isla crept reluctantly out into the teeth of a gale and driving snow with the coal bucket while scoffing at her own foolishness. Alissandru kissed her once and she started fretting about their lack of a future as a couple. How ridiculous! He would run like the wind if he knew! Her grandma had raised a young woman out of step with the modern world, imprinting her with a belief pattern that others had long since abandoned.
And Alissandru would be the worst possible man for her to experiment with, she told herself impatiently. No, she would light a fire in the bedroom for him, cook him a hot meal and keep her distance by dozing in an armchair overnight. If she had roused his expectations of something more than a kiss, and she was convinced that she had, she would make it clear that nothing was going to happen. And with the options a man as gorgeous as Alissandru had in his life, that disappointment was hardly going to break his heart. In fact, it was much more likely that Alissandru had only come on to her in the first place because she was the only woman available. Her nose wrinkled. His apparent attraction to her suddenly no longer seemed flattering.
Isla trundled kindling, coal and logs upstairs and lit the bedroom fire while listening to the water running in the bathroom. There would be no hot water left for her use: he must’ve emptied the tank. The back burner in the fire was efficient at heating the water but Isla was trained to spend no more than ten minutes under the shower.
Warm for the first time since arriving in the frozen north of Scotland, Alissandru dried himself vigorously with a towel and stepped out onto the icy landing in his boxers, passing on through into the bedroom at speed where the flickering hot flames of a very welcome fire greeted him. In his eagerness to reach the warmth of the fire, he forgot to lower his head to avoid the rafters above and reaped a stunning blow to his skull. He groaned, teetered sickly where he stood for a second or two and then dropped like a falling tree to the wooden floor.
Isla heard the crash of something heavy falling overhead and stilled for an instant. Alissandru must’ve dropped something or knocked something flying. She rolled her eyes and got on with chopping the vegetables for the stew she was preparing, thinking that at least Alissandru had finally dragged himself out of the shower. The quicker she got the casserole into the oven, the sooner they could eat.
What had Alissandru knocked over? Her brow indented because there was very little clutter in that room and nothing that would make a noise of that magnitude when it fell, unless it was the wardrobe or the chest of drawers. Suddenly anxious, Isla called his name up the stairs and waited but no answer came. Compressing her lips, she went up and through the ajar door saw Alissandru lying in the middle of the floor on his back. He was naked apart from a pair of black cotton boxers. With a stricken exclamation, she sped over to him, horrified to register that he was unconscious. What on earth had he done to himself?
She touched a bare brown shoulder, noting how cold he was, and she jumped to her feet to drag the duvet off the bed and wrap it round him. That small step accomplished, she carefully smoothed her fingers through his hair and felt the smooth stickiness of blood as well as a rising bump. She released her breath in a short hiss and raced back downstairs to lift the phone and call the local doctor.
Unfortunately, the doctor was out attending a home delivery but the doctor’s wife, a friendly, practical woman whom Isla had known since childhood, was able to tell her exactly how to treat a patient with concussion and warn her what to expect. Out of breath, she hurried back to Alissandru’s side, relieved to see the flicker of his eyelids and the slight movements that signified his return to consciousness.
‘Alissandru...?’ she murmured.
His outrageously long black eyelashes lifted and he stared at her with a dazed frowning look. ‘What happened?’
‘You fell. I think you bashed your head on something.’
‘Hellish headache,’ he conceded, lifting his hand and trying to touch his head. He was noticeably disorientated and clumsy and she grasped his hand before he could touch the swelling.
‘Lie still for a moment until you get your bearings,’ she urged. ‘I’ll bring you painkillers when it’s safe to leave you.’
Alissandru stared up at her, the blur of her face slowly filling in on detail. He blinked because her hair looked as if it were on fire in the light cast by the flickering flames. Her mop of curls glinted in sugar-maple colours that encompassed every shade from red to tawny to gold. Her blue eyes were full of anxiety and he immediately wanted to soothe her. ‘I’m fine,’ he told her, instinctively lying. ‘Why am I on the floor?’
‘You fell,’ she reminded him again, worried by his confused state of mind. ‘Can you move your legs and arms? We want to check that nothing’s broken before we try to get you up.’
‘Who’s we?’
‘You and me as a team,’ Isla rephrased. ‘Don’t nit-pick, Alissandru. What a fright you gave me when I saw you lying here!’
‘Legs and arms fine,’ Alissandru confirmed, shifting his lean, powerful body with a groan. ‘But my head’s killing me.’
‘Do you think you could get up? You would be more comfortable in the bed,’ she pointed out.
‘Of course I can get up,’ Alissandru assured her, but it wasn’t as easy as he assumed and Isla hoped because the instant Alissandru began to get up, he was overtaken by a bout of dizziness, and Isla struggled to steady him when he swayed.
But he was too heavy for her to hold and he slumped back against the bed for support, shaking his head as though trying to clear it and muttering something in Sicilian that she suspected was a curse. ‘I feel like I’m very drunk,’ he acknowledged blearily, bracing himself on the mattress to stay upright.
‘You’ll feel better when you’re lying flat again,’ Isla declared, hoping she was right while her brain spent an inordinate amount of time struggling to process his near nudity at the same time as guilt that she had noticed that reality attacked her conscience.
But there it was, a near-naked Alissandru was a shockingly eye-catching sight, particularly when Isla had never seen a flesh-and-blood man in that state close up. Of course, she had seen men in trunks at the swimming pool but had nev
er found her gaze tempted to wander or linger on those men, but when it came to Alissandru, dragging her attention from the corrugated expanse of his muscular abs and powerful biceps was a disconcerting challenge. Was it because she knew him? Simple feminine curiosity? Her face burning, she moved forward to help him turn around on unsteady feet and climb into the bed.
But what looked easy turned out to be anything but and in her fear of his falling again she got pinned between him and the bed and safely manoeuvring him down onto the mattress involved a considerable amount of physical contact that drenched her in perspiration and embarrassment. Finally, she managed to get Alissandru lying flat but by that stage she was painfully aware of the tented arousal beneath his boxers that all that sliding against his near-naked bronzed body had provoked. She pounced on the duvet still lying on the floor and flung it back over him with relief.
‘No, you lie there and don’t move. Don’t touch your head either,’ she instructed. ‘I’m going downstairs to get painkillers for you and the first-aid box.’
Alissandru gave her a dazed half-smile. ‘Bossy, aren’t you?’
‘I’m good in a crisis and this is a crisis because if it hadn’t been for Dr McKinney’s wife I wouldn’t have known what to do with you,’ Isla admitted guiltily. ‘First chance I get, I’m going to do one of those emergency-first-aid courses that are so popular now.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ Alissandru asserted, unwillingly impressed by her genuine concern for his well-being.
Tania would have kicked him while he was down and taken advantage of his vulnerability any way she could but Isla’s only goal was to take care of him to the best of her ability. He rested his aching head on the pillows with a stifled groan, feeling trapped, knowing in frustration that he didn’t dare even stand up when his balance was so out of sync. His vision was blurred as well, only slowly achieving normal focus. He should have told her that he had done four years at medical school before his father’s death had made his dropping out of university inevitable. Neither his brother nor his mother had been up to the demands of taking control of his father’s business enterprises. Alissandru had had to step in and take charge and if, at the time, he had loathed the necessity of giving up his dream of becoming a doctor, he had since learned to love the cut and thrust of the business world and revel in the siren call of new technology worthy of his investment.