by Lynne Graham
Isla returned with a glass of water and a couple of pills. ‘Don’t know if they’ll help,’ she said ruefully, trying to prop pillows behind him to help him sit up.
‘Might take the edge off it.’ Alissandru drained the glass and slumped back down again. ‘I want to sleep but I know I shouldn’t sleep for long.’
‘I didn’t know that until the doctor’s wife told me that I had to keep checking on you, waking you up if necessary to work out whether you were getting worse. But if the helicopter couldn’t pick you up this evening, I’m not sure how the emergency medics could get through either,’ she told him ruefully. ‘Lift your head.’
Isla knelt beside him, skimming cautious fingers through his luxuriant silky hair and swabbing away the blood, finally spotting the cut and tracing the swelling beneath. ‘It doesn’t look like it needs stitches but it’s still bleeding a little. You could have a fractured skull,’ she warned him. ‘Try to stay still. I’m going to get dinner into the oven and then I’ll come back up.’
‘Could you put the light out?’ Alissandru asked. ‘It’s hurting my eyes.’
Isla switched off the bedside lamp and fed the fire to keep it burning. Before she left the room she glanced back at him where he lay in the bed, his dark eyes reflecting the golden heat of the firelight at her. He didn’t look right to her lying so still and quiet, his innate restless volatility suppressed.
She finished the casserole and put it on to cook before laying a tray. That achieved, she went up to check on Alissandru. He was awake and watching the fire.
‘I’m supposed to ask you stupid questions now like what day it is and who the British Prime Minister is,’ she confided.
Alissandru responded straight away with the answers. ‘There’s nothing wrong with my brain. It’s just working slower than usual,’ he told her lazily and he stretched out an arm and patted the vacant side of the bed. ‘Come and sit down and keep me company. Tell me about you and Paulu.’
Isla went stiff and stayed where she was, belatedly recalling the inheritance he had mentioned and feeling very uncomfortable at the thought of her late brother-in-law having left her anything. ‘We were friends. While he and Tania were separated he came to see me several times to talk about her, not that I could tell him much because I didn’t know her that well,’ she pointed out tautly. ‘I liked your brother a lot...but I assure you that there was nothing sexual between us.’
Lifting his tousled head several inches off the pillows, Alissandru shrugged a bare brown shoulder in fluid dismissal. ‘It would’ve explained a great deal if there had been,’ he commented.
‘There wasn’t,’ Isla emphasised flatly.
‘I’m not going to apologise,’ Alissandru warned her. ‘It was a natural suspicion.’
Isla gritted her teeth, swallowing back a rude remark about his lack of faith in standards of family behaviour and the kind of people he must know to harbour such a sleazy suspicion. He was a hard, distrustful man and she wasn’t going to change that reality by arguing with him. ‘Paulu would never have been unfaithful to my sister.’
Alissandru compressed his wide sensual mouth. ‘More’s the pity.’
‘I’ll bring dinner up when it’s ready,’ she said stiltedly, burrowing into the hot press on the landing to find fresh clothing for herself and heading into the bathroom for a shower.
She found it so hard not to rise to Alissandru’s every pointed comment, but she was determined not to lose her temper with him again. It had scared her when she’d lost her temper to the extent she had earlier because she had flown at him like a shrew and tried to slap him. He had brought out a side of her she didn’t like. Being that out of control was frightening.
She dried herself on a very damp towel and pulled on her fleece lounging set, which also doubled as pyjamas on the coldest nights. Coloured grey, the set was sexless and unrevealing. In any case, she was convinced that Alissandru’s accident had banished any raunchy expectations she might have awakened by succumbing to that kiss. Thankfully they had moved way beyond that level now, she reasoned, scolding herself for the tiny pang of disappointment that made her heart heavy.
She had only once envied her sister, Tania, and that had been when she’d recognised how much Paulu loved Tania, regardless of her capriciousness. Always popular with men, however, Tania had simply accepted her husband’s devotion as her due.
But nobody had ever loved Isla the way Tania had been loved.
Tania had been the apple of their mother’s eye but Isla had barely known the woman and their father had died before she was born. Her grandparents had been both kind and loving but she had always been conscious that she was an extra burden and expense to two pensioners, who had worked hard throughout their lives with very little material reward.
Alissandru’s momentary interest had sent Isla’s imagination rocketing and made her body fizz with new energy because that kiss had been just about the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her. And wasn’t that in itself a pathetic truth? she told herself with self-loathing.
CHAPTER THREE
WHILE ISLA WAS keeping busy in the kitchen and setting a tray, Alissandru lay back bored in bed and wondered why Isla had yet to ask him what she had inherited from his brother. Was that a deliberate avoidance tactic calculated to impress him with her lack of avarice? But why would she want to impress him? After all, regardless of Alissandru’s feelings, she would receive that inheritance. Her attitude, however, was an anomaly and Alissandru didn’t like anomalies. He flatly refused to accept that Tania could have a sister who wasn’t greedy. His sister-in-law had craved money the way a dying man would crave water or air.
And moving on from his inflexible conviction that Isla had to be a gold-digger like so many other women he had met, he thought about that kiss and wondered what insanity had possessed him. Tania’s sister, so inappropriate a choice. But she tasted like strawberries and cream, all the evocative flavours of a summer day and sunlight. Alissandru frowned darkly, forced to recognise afresh that his brain had yet to recover its normal function. That blow to the head had done more damage than he appreciated when his sharp-as-a-tack logic was failing to filter out such a fanciful comparison. Isla was curiously sexy and that was it, no need to be thinking about tastes and flavours, he told himself irritably.
Stupendously sexy, he adjusted, the ready stirring at his groin provoking him to greater honesty. He didn’t understand why, he simply recognised that the minute she touched him, or indeed got anywhere near him, he reacted with an almost juvenile instant surge of excitement. A woman had never heated him up so fast or with such ease and it bothered him, because no way was he in the market for an affair with Tania’s sister.
Isla brought in the tray, watching as Alissandru dragged himself up against the pillows to accept it. His bronzed skin gleamed in the firelight, accentuating a honed and very muscular physique straight out of a woman’s fantasy. Her face burned and she wondered if she should be searching for a pair of her uncle’s pyjamas to offer him. But wouldn’t that make her look like a prude? It was her bet that Alissandru routinely wore little in bed.
‘What on earth are you wearing?’ Alissandru enquired as he accepted the tray, his brows drawing together as he studied the furry fabric top and loose bottoms to match.
‘It’s warm.’
‘Where’s your meal?’ he asked.
‘Downstairs,’ she admitted stiffly.
‘Per carita, Isla!’ Alissandru exclaimed. ‘It’s boring up here alone.’
The tip of her tongue slid out to moisten her dry lower lip, discomfiture gripping her. ‘I’ll bring mine up,’ she finally said, feeling a little foolish over her determination to avoid him simply because he made her feel uncomfortable.
She sank down on the side of the bed beside him, both flustered and harassed by the amused glance he flung her as she slowly lifted her legs up after her to balan
ce the tray on her knees. So, it was a bed, no need to make a silly fuss about that when there was no chair available, she instructed herself in exasperation.
‘You still haven’t fully explained your connection with Paulu,’ Alissandru remarked softly.
Isla gritted her teeth on her fork. ‘We became friends...he was upset about his marriage breaking down and I tried to advise him on how to get Tania back.’
‘Good to know who I have to thank for that final mistake,’ Alissandru commented drily.
‘You need a filter button before you speak,’ Isla told him tartly.
‘Share with me the advice you gave him,’ Alissandru urged.
She turned her head to look at him and, unexpectedly, her heart softened. She recognised the glow of curiosity in his eyes for what it was: a kind of hunger to know and understand anything about his twin that he had been excluded from, and naturally Paulu had not shared his eagerness to reclaim his estranged wife with a brother who had probably cheered at her departure.
‘Paulu was behaving like a stalker. He was sending Tania emails, texts and showering her with invitations and it wasn’t getting him anywhere. Tania was annoyed he had followed her back to London,’ Isla admitted ruefully. ‘She told me the marriage was over.’
‘So, what changed?’
‘I don’t know for sure because, apart from a text from Paulu telling me they were giving their marriage another go, I didn’t get to see either of them again,’ Isla confided ruefully. ‘But I had warned Paulu to stop chasing her and to back off and give her some space. She took him for granted...you see.’
‘Sì,’ Alissandru agreed grimly.
‘But at the same time, Paulu was Tania’s security blanket, her safe place, and I suspect that if he did show a little backbone and she started to fear that she truly was losing him for ever, she might think again.’
‘It’s the eighth wonder of the world that Paulu and I shared the same womb,’ Alissandru intoned. ‘We barely had a thought in common.’
‘You were twins.’
‘Fraternal. I inherited more of my father’s traits but Paulu didn’t have an aggressive bone in his body.’
‘He had much more important gifts,’ Isla cut in. ‘He was kind and loving and generous.’
‘Sì, very generous,’ Alissandru sliced in darkly, setting his tray down and welding his broad shoulders to the headboard in physical emphasis of his exasperated sarcasm. ‘If he hadn’t almost bankrupted himself treating Tania to her every wish before he married her, he wouldn’t have got himself into so much financial trouble afterwards.’
Isla set down her tray as well, her heart-shaped face troubled. ‘Is that what you always do? Take the gloomy view?’
‘The truth can hurt and I don’t avoid it,’ Alissandru assured her.
‘But what you’re refusing to see is how happy Tania made your brother. You may not have liked her, but he adored her and I’m so grateful they got back together before they died,’ Isla confessed emotively. ‘How happy was he the last time you saw him?’
Unimpressed by her sentimental outlook, Alissandru thought back to his last meeting with his twin. Ironically, only days before the helicopter crash, Paulu had been full of the joys of spring, striding into Alissandru’s office to cheerfully announce that Tania was willing to try for a baby. Alissandru had been taken aback by the unashamed depth of his brother’s desire to have a child of his own because it was not an aspiration that had ever entered Alissandru’s head. No, for Alissandru, having a family featured only in some far distant future and it was not something he felt any need to consider before he even reached his thirtieth birthday.
‘He was happy,’ Alissandru admitted grudgingly, and even as he uttered those words he felt some of the weight of his grief slip free and lighten his heart. Suddenly he realised what a comfort it was to look back and recognise that his twin’s last months had been joyful because he had reunited with the love of his life and together they had been planning a more settled future.
Isla turned to study him, her wide blue eyes full of understanding and compassion. ‘And doesn’t that make you feel better? I know it makes me feel better.’
That truth was so simple it positively shrieked at Alissandru but he had not seen that truth for himself and in a sudden movement he snaked an arm round her and pulled her close.
‘Grazie...thank you,’ he breathed in a hoarse tone of relief, his eyes hot liquid gold with naked emotion.
He had such beautiful eyes, she found herself thinking again, and the spiky black lashes surrounding them only boosted their appeal. And as she gazed up at him he lowered his dark head and crushed her soft mouth under his, sending a wave of such hopeless longing snaking through Isla that she shivered with the effect of it.
‘You’re cold,’ Alissandru assumed, lifting her onto his lap to throw back the duvet and then shift her beneath it and back into his strong arms.
Spontaneous laughter shook Alissandru’s body as he held her. ‘You feel furry like a teddy bear,’ he confided unevenly. ‘Is there really a woman underneath the fur?’
Taken aback by both his boldness and his amusement, Isla winced. ‘I didn’t want to be wearing anything provocative around you.’
‘It’s definitely not provocative,’ Alissandru assured her, long fingers smoothing her soft curls back from her face. ‘But then I only need to look at you to want you, mia bella.’
Sentenced to stillness by that startling admission, Isla gazed up at him, barely crediting that she was in his arms in a bed. Could it be true that she attracted him to that extent? Even though he had despised her sister and had revealed, with his accusation about Paulu, a worrying bias against her likely character as well?
‘Stop thinking so hard,’ Alissandru urged her, a fingertip smoothing the frown line forming between her delicate brows.
The heat of his big powerful body filtering through her lounging pyjamas made her feel warm and secure. He actually wanted her. Alissandru Rossetti wanted her and somehow that made Isla feel less alone. But then, at the age of twenty-two she had lost every living person who had ever mattered to her and she often felt alone. Her uncle and aunt were one of those couples so content to be a couple that they rarely invited visitors and, although they always assured her that she was welcome, Isla was not comfortable inviting herself.
‘Are you warm enough now?’ Alissandru enquired silkily, a hand sliding beneath her top to splay across her midriff.
Her breath snarled up in her throat at the feel of his big hand against her skin. She couldn’t think straight and an instant of panic claimed her because she had never been in such an intimate situation with a man. Her brain whirred at a frantic pace because she knew that Alissandru would expect sex. And why not? another little voice chimed in the back of her head. Why not? Why shouldn’t she? She was finally with a man who made her heart beat so fast she felt breathless. And shouldn’t that be celebrated rather than denied or suppressed?
‘Yes...you’re as effective as an electric blanket,’ she told him awkwardly.
Alissandru dealt her an incredulous look from glittering dark eyes and then his wide sensual mouth curved and he laughed again. ‘Never heard that one before.’
And Isla knew it was the moment where she should mention her lack of experience because he obviously hadn’t a clue, but pride silenced her. He would think she was a freak still being so innocent at her age and she didn’t want him thinking that of her, much preferring that he should assume that she was as casual about sex as she had been told he was.
‘I feel at peace for the first time in weeks,’ Alissandru admitted reflectively. ‘What you said about Paulu being happy...it helped.’
‘I’m glad,’ she whispered, lifting a hand to trace her fingers down over his stubbled jaw line, appreciating the masculine roughness of his skin and the dark shadowing that accentuated his beautifully shaped
mouth.
‘Maledizione...ti voglio... I want you,’ Alissandru breathed in a raw, driven undertone, his body hot and taut from even that glancing caress.
His sensual mouth ravished hers, sending a shower of sparks flaring low in her belly, and he shifted against her, letting her feel the hard thrust of his readiness in the cradle of her thighs. The pressure of him at the junction of her thighs electrified her, making her almost painfully aware that that was where she really needed to be touched. He leant back from her to lift her top up over her head and she gasped in surprise, only just resisting the urge to cover her exposed breasts.
The cold air pinched her nipples, and she flushed all over as he gazed down at her hungrily.
‘It’s a sin to cover those,’ Alissandru growled, curving a reverent hand to a lush breast crowned with a pouting pink nipple and dipping his head to savour that peak with his mouth.
Her brain in a wild whirl, Isla felt her back arch of its own volition and her pelvis tilt up as heat surged between her legs. He toyed with her other breast, tugging at the sensitive crest until her head fell back, her neck extending as the storm of her response grew stronger. She had never felt anything so powerful before, had not known her body had the ability to feel anything that intense. And then before she could even catch her breath, Alissandru was divesting her of her pants and prying her thighs apart to bury his wicked mouth there instead.
Shock consumed Isla and she parted dry lips to protest. Of course, she knew what he was doing but it was not something she had ever thought would appeal to her, at least until Alissandru applied his tongue to the most sensitive spot on her entire body and a spectacular wave of sensation engulfed her. And the tide of sensation built and built as he entered her with his fingers until she was writhing in response, agonised gasps torn from her parted lips, and for a split second as that explosive peak of pleasure gripped her she saw stars, jerking and out of control, blissful cries wrenched from her lips.