by Lynne Graham
Clothed, Raffaele was intimidating, naked he was even more magnificently overwhelming. He had the physique of a Greek God, carved in vibrant warm bronzed flesh rather than cold marble. From his broad shoulders to his powerful torso, narrow hips and long, strong legs, he was a vision of sleek masculine virility such as she had never seen in real life. Her bemused attention roamed down over the hard contours of his muscular chest to the corrugated lean flatness of his stomach, lingering on the silky line of dark hair that furrowed down over his belly...and there her gaze froze, wide with dismay.
‘Well, don’t look at me like that if you don’t want that to happen.’ Raffaele laughed with rich appreciation as she reddened and turned her head away. ‘You can’t be that innocent.’
‘I was more into mathematics than men,’ Maya fielded as Raffaele, still gloriously, unashamedly naked, came down on the bed beside her and left her breathless.
He lifted a dark brow and frowned, as if he could not comprehend that amount of indifference. ‘Always?’
Maya shrugged a bare shoulder. ‘It’s just the way I’m wired.’
‘It’s insidiously attractive...’
Maya looked up into brilliant dark eyes that had the glitter of stars below his curling lashes and her heart jumped beneath her ribs and began a slow heavy pound, her body in a sort of heavy stasis that seemed to have nothing to do with her brain. He lifted a hand slowly, brown fingers curving to her cheekbone, and those stunning eyes of his, as dark and riveting as polished jet, held hers, heat pulsing through her in an involuntary rush, the sheer basic attraction that had freaked her out the day before flowing through her, and suddenly she was questioning why she was fighting what she was feeling because he no longer felt like a stranger.
He had reunited her with her grandparents, given her fabulous jewellery and looked after her when she was drunk in a way she would never have expected him to do. Underneath that façade of his, he was not inherently cruel, not innately cold, he was a much more enthralling mix.
‘...ensuring that I have the greatest difficulty keeping my hands off you,’ he confided in hoarsened completion.
And it was as if something simply snapped into place inside Maya and she stretched up a couple of inches to lay her lips against his as she urged, ‘Don’t—’
‘Maya?’
‘Less talk, more action,’ she muttered boldly, letting the desire and the fascination take charge of her for the first time ever.
And finally, he kissed her, and it was as if her body had been waiting all her life for that sweet wildness to engulf her from her head to her toes, leaving her feeling almost detached from the self she had thought she knew. She moved to sit up, but his hand splayed across her spine, pushing her back against the pillows, controlling the pace with a masculine urgency that she found indescribably sexy. His lips parted hers and his tongue delved deep and tangled with her own, sending a tide of electrifying hunger pulsing through her with the efficacy of a drug in her bloodstream.
That fast, she discovered that she wanted more, was indeed impossibly greedy for more of him, and it shocked her to recognise that deep-down craving she had fought to restrain as though it were toxic when, indeed, it seemed to be exactly what she needed most. As Raffaele lowered his mouth to the straining pout of her rosy nipples and lingered there, toying with the stiff crests, her heartbeat hammered like crazy and a wash of heat engulfed her pelvis. It occurred to her that, only hours earlier, she had been ducking behind a sheet, pretty much embarrassed to show off that part of her because she didn’t have very much to offer in the boob department, as he himself had once noted.
‘I like...’ Raffaele told her with a brazen smile that was very Manzini, framing the small mounds in splayed fingers, a thumb caressing each throbbing tip. ‘Just enough, not too much and real.’
‘Hope you can say the same about your own anatomy,’ Maya quipped, shocked at herself for that response and staring at him with shaken eyes, thinking, I did not say that, that is not me.
Raffaele burst out laughing and gazed down at her with startled dark golden eyes. ‘You give as good as you get...right? That’s good. It’s a quality you need with me, bellezza mia,’ he told her with surprising sincerity. ‘I can be—’
‘Challenging?’ Maya slotted in helplessly. ‘I noticed.’
Raffaele grinned and kissed her again, his hands roaming over a body that already felt fiercely sensitised to his touch. The throb pulsing at the apex of her thighs was new to her, making her shift restlessly, her hips rising with a hunger she only recognised subliminally because thought didn’t seem possible in the midst of her growing physical excitement. The feather-soft touch of a finger just there and she could feel herself lighting up like a forest fire, nerve endings jumping, a mesmerising warmth enthralling her feminine core while the slick dampness gathered.
‘It’s like an equation. You and me and the parameters,’ Maya pronounced with a glorious smile of discovery.
‘OK,’ Raffaele agreed, because he didn’t know what she was talking about but it seemed to be making her happy.
‘I bet I could make a model of it!’ she exclaimed, her brain already homing in on the possibilities.
And Raffaele could see that she was ready to leap out of bed and look for a whiteboard or some such thing to engage in the kind of mathematics that inflamed her meteoric brain. ‘But not right now,’ he told her urgently. ‘Right now, we stay on task.’
Maya blinked up at him, green eyes limpid as ferns with sheer disappointment, and he kissed her again because it felt like the only thing he could do to distract her. And it worked, mercifully it worked, he conceded, shaken up by that experience when he himself was utterly lost in the magic of her response to him.
‘I’m burning up for you, bellezza mia,’ he growled.
‘Oh...’ Maya trailed gentle fingers through his wildly tousled black hair. ‘I’ve messed up your hair, clutching it.’
‘Go right ahead,’ he encouraged, dragging in a sustaining breath, his broad chest expanding that something about him could hold her interest.
‘You don’t mind?’ That glorious smile was angled at him again.
Out of words, Raffaele crushed her mouth under his again, struggling to stay in control, fighting not to fall on her like an animal, a hunger of storm-force potency driving him. It was, without a doubt and yet utterly inexplicably to him, the most exciting sexual experience of his life.
‘I want you too,’ she whispered unevenly, her body quivering, shifting up to his in invitation as the unbearable longing stabbed at her afresh.
He slid over her, easing into her, giving her time to adjust to that unfamiliar intrusion. Maya tried not to tense and looked up into his taut, intent face, the lustrous dark eyes alight with a hunger as deep as her own. Something she hadn’t even known she was worrying about quieted within her because she saw that he was fighting for control as much as she was. There was a momentary sharp piercing pain and then that introduction was over and there was only the rousing stimulation of feeling her own body stretch to accept the fullness of his. From the first subtle shift of his hips, she was needy, wanting, aglow with the discovery of that enthralling newness.
Fierce sensation assailed her, and her eyes widened, the spark of excitement flashing into a flame that burned in the most pleasurable of ways. More, she wanted to shout, more, and it took effort to stay silent while the raw excitement roaring through her built and built until finally he was slamming into her, wonderfully wild and passionate, and she was urging him on with her body in the only way she knew how, legs wrapping round him, nails turned into talons raking down his smooth spine in her insistence.
She soared to a peak that sent her flying into a million pieces, her whole body consumed by that intensity that lifted her to an unimaginable high and then left her floating in a sea of drowning pleasure.
‘That was amazing,’ Maya sighed.
‘Thank you.’
And that quickly, Raffaele knew what it was about Maya that intrigued him. He had never met a woman like her, never had sex with a woman like her, never even dreamt that a woman like her even existed because she was so different that she smashed every one of his trite expectations.
‘That was my line,’ Raffaele husked in an informative tone as he lifted his head from the tumbled swathes of her blonde hair, which smelled like strawberries, he noted abstractedly as he levered his weight off her and slid to one side.
‘No, that’s basic relationship stuff,’ Maya informed him with superiority. ‘If you do something well, I should praise you for it.’
‘Like you’re training a pet?’ Raffaele derided.
‘Well, if you’re going to take offence at the most innocent comment,’ Maya countered.
‘Allow me to warn you...tact is not your biggest strength,’ Raffaele pointed out with another grin.
‘Oh, I know that,’ Maya replied without concern. ‘You’re not the first person to label me socially awkward. I live inside my head most of the time. I’m not observant either.’
In wonderment, Raffaele watched her slide out of the bed and away from him, no hanging around, no after-sex fondling, cuddling, absolutely nothing sought from him. ‘Where are you going?’ he asked lazily.
‘I need a shower. Sex is messy,’ Maya sighed.
Raffaele raised an ebony brow. ‘I think you’re supposed to lie flat for a while afterwards if you’re trying to get pregnant,’ he murmured silkily.
Maya blinked and walked back to the bed like a naked forest nymph with her hair flowing round her. Beneath his arrested gaze, she lay down again. Felled by an old wives’ tale, he conceded in fascination, but for some strange reason he didn’t want her washing him off her again and walking away from him.
‘How long do I have to lie here for?’
‘Ten minutes should be enough,’ Raffaele breathed, trying very hard not to laugh because she looked as trapped as he had often felt when women tried to hold him by their side and that was a novel experience, not entirely to his satisfaction. He would, he appreciated, have to learn how to cuddle if he wanted her to stay with him afterwards. And why would he want that?
‘This is so...do you have a pen and paper?’ Maya asked suddenly, wondering if she could come up with an equation that matched them as a couple and their relationship and calculating the probabilities.
Raffaele reached over and provided her with both from the nightstand nearest him. He lay back watching as she covered line after line with what to him were incomprehensible mathematical notations. Every so often she paused, smooth brow furrowing while she pondered, and then she would be off onto a fresh page, so wrapped in her calculations that he reckoned that a volcanic eruption would not have penetrated her concentration.
He went for a shower and when he emerged, she was still at it and she hadn’t glanced up once. It was as if he had vanished; it was as if he didn’t exist. He discovered that he absolutely loathed that sensation. It reminded him of the frequent occasions when his mother had forgotten his needs as a child, overlooking the necessity of his eating or sleeping. Of course, his mother, Julieta, had often lived in her own world, cocooned from reality.
‘We’re getting off the boat,’ he told her loudly.
A thousand miles away, for all he knew mentally on another planet, she looked up at him, beautiful sea-glass eyes distant.
‘We’ve arrived at the island where we’re spending our honeymoon,’ Raffaele extended.
‘Oh...’ Maya gasped, blinking to take in the sea of paper surrounding her and her still naked, unwashed state. ‘I zoned out, didn’t I?’
‘You did,’ Raffaele agreed.
‘Don’t dump anything!’ she warned him as she leapt off the bed and vanished into the bathroom.
Raffaele picked an outfit out of the new wardrobe she had yet to discover, gossamer-fine undies in lilac, a strappy sundress. He knocked on the bathroom door and entered when she shouted out, ‘Yes?’ sounding very harassed.
‘Clothes,’ Raffaele announced, resting them down on a chair, thinking for a second and then yanking out towels for her use as well because he wasn’t sure she would find them on her own. He had never had to look after anyone or anything in many, many years and it felt weird.
‘Marriage not quite what you expected?’ Sal had mocked. Raffaele conceded that at least he wasn’t bored.
‘Oh, that was kind of you,’ Maya remarked, swathing herself in a towel. ‘That’s what Izzy does when she’s trying to hurry me up...my goodness, those aren’t my clothes—’
‘They are now. I bought them for you.’
Maya sent him a glance that suggested that he was in some way strange and sort of shrugged, not interested enough in clothes, it seemed, to enquire any further. Raffaele stepped back out again and within minutes she emerged, none of the lengthy feminine preparation for his company that he was used to receiving apparent in her appearance. She had combed her wet hair, hadn’t bothered to dry it, only braid it, and yet still she drew his gaze like a magnet. Something about that slender, leggy, graceful figure, those delicate features or that unexpectedly luscious pink mouth exuded radical appeal.
Maya focused on Raffaele, a sort of creeping shyness briefly enfolding her as she allowed herself to finally recall that experience in the bed with him. Transcendent, earth-shattering, she mused with a little inner quiver she could not suppress. She had never dreamt that sex might be addictive like that. Was it only because she had been with him? Or was something deeper involved? Was she starting to feel more than she should for him? Surely not? She was not stupid. And yet the pull he exerted over her was extreme, her eyes constantly needing to stray back to him.
That seemed to be what that physical chemistry could deliver, and she should accept a blessing where she could find one in their business marriage, she told herself urgently. At least, trying to get pregnant wasn’t going to be a disgusting ordeal. She really should only deal with Raffaele with logic. All the emotion she was fighting around him could be a disaster in the making, she reasoned worriedly, terrified of getting attached to him in any way. She wouldn’t allow herself to feel anything for him and that would keep her safe from hurt or disillusionment.
* * *
The launch carved a sure passage through the deep blue Mediterranean Sea to the small island that lay ahead. It was an exhilarating ride and all Maya could see of the island was a pale sand beach fringed by trees with a glimpse of a low roof somewhere behind them. Honeymoon, she mused uneasily—it hadn’t occurred to her that he would take such a conventional path to his objective.
Raffaele gazed stonily ahead, refusing to acknowledge the nightmare glimmers of his memories. He wasn’t a sensitive guy, he didn’t look back to the past and dwell unhealthily on it, no, he put it behind him, which was why he had chosen to bring Maya there to this superficially very beautiful little islet, which was both convenient and suitable for purpose.
Even so, when he swept a laughing Maya up into his arms and brought her down on the soft pale sand he had often played on as a child, his stomach still churned sickly when he too stepped out of the launch.
‘The path’s up here,’ he murmured, moving ahead of her as guide, refusing to surrender to that queasiness in his gut because only the frightened, traumatised child he had once been would react that way.
‘You’ve been here before?’
‘It’s one of my late mother’s many properties, like the villa where we held the wedding. I used the villa because Aldo isn’t able to travel far now and I’m using Aoussa—as it’s called—because...because it makes sense to use it.’
As they walked beneath the palm trees lining the walkway, something in that uncharacteristic hesitation in his dark deep drawl furrowed her brow and filled her with a sense of unease. ‘Did you grow up here?’
�
�No, Julieta used it for summer breaks or simply when she was in the mood to be alone...aside of the staff,’ he told her curtly. ‘She brought all her new husbands here, her lovers. Aoussa was one of her favourite places.’
‘Did you lose your mother recently?’ Maya prompted, seeking an explanation for the tension he couldn’t hide. It was etched in the taut lines and hollows forming across his strong bone structure.
‘Julieta has been gone ten years. I was in my final year at boarding school when she died.’ Raffaele strode on, determined to overcome the reactions assailing him because he was not weak or vulnerable any longer, he was a man, a strong man.
‘You didn’t call her Mother?’
‘No. She didn’t like to be called that,’ Raffaele admitted gruffly.
An unexpectedly large building lay beyond the trees. It was all on one level, probably ultra-modern in its day with its many windows looking out over the ornamental gardens or towards the sea and shore exposed on the other side of the island. ‘It is beautiful and clearly well maintained,’ Maya commented. ‘How long is it since your last visit?’
Raffaele thrust open the front door. ‘Twenty-odd years,’ he admitted grudgingly. ‘Julieta went off it.’
In silence, Maya raised a brow, walking off on her own through big airy rooms, furnished in timeless style. She couldn’t even begin to imagine owning a house that she hadn’t visited in two decades or the level of wealth that could allow such lavish behaviour. She peered out into an interior courtyard and opened the door, turning her head to see where Raffaele was and immediately realising that something was wrong.
He was poised by the full-length windows staring out into the courtyard, his lean hands coiled into fists and trembling by his side, a sheen of perspiration gleaming on his bronzed face. Every muscle in his body was rigid.