by Dani Collins
“I don’t know.” She sobered. “I appreciate that you want to indulge me, but...” She sighed. “Much as I dream we could become a family for Aurelia’s sake, I can’t agree to marry you. Not until I have a better sense that you and I will be able to make a proper go of it.”
“You make a proper go of it by going all in,” he said in a hard voice. “By making a commitment and sticking to it through thick or thin.”
“It’s just that easy, is it? You’re going all in? Not going to hold anything back?”
She watched his cheek tick. She wasn’t sure why that went straight into her heart like a branding iron, but it did. She gripped her elbows.
“I’m willing to bring Aurelia to Italy and see how it goes. That’s as much as I’ll give you right now.”
His turn to offer a harsh chuckle that scraped along her nerve endings.
“Take as long as you like to think it over,” he said in a mild tone belied by his granite posture and ruthless smile. “So long as you’ve decided to marry me when our wedding date rolls around in fourteen days. I came in to say you should call the villa, tell them I’m sending my pilot to collect Aurelia. He’ll come back for us and we’ll proceed to Italy from here.”
“What? No.” Her blood zinged with alarm. “I can’t leave from here. I have things I need. From my studio.”
“Make a list. Someone can pack and forward it.”
“No.” Her arms shot straight down at her sides. “No one goes into my studio. Not unless I’m there and invite them. No one touches my things.” The idea made her hyperventilate on a good day. Today she was already overwrought and bordering on mania.
With a weary sigh, he said, “Tantrums don’t work on me, Kiara.”
“I’m not joking!” Her arm flailed. “I get uptight when someone comes in and I’m there. People can’t go in and touch my things.”
He caught her wrist and studied the way her fingers were trembling. His touch shifted so he could feel the unsteady race of her pulse.
“They’re only things, Kiara,” he said quietly.
“They’re my things and we’re going to need a safe word if you’re going to make outlandish suggestions like telling me to let others touch them.” She pulled away from his touch, embarrassed and trying to turn her reaction into a joke but failing spectacularly. “I know it’s not rational.” Her eyes were welling with helplessness. “But my studio is where I’m...me.” Where she allowed herself to be vulnerable. “You don’t let strangers walk up and touch everything under your clothes, do you?”
He quirked a brow. “Wrong man to ask. I strip for strangers all the time.”
Not all the time. Not anymore. Did he? What would happen if they were married? Would he have other lovers besides her?
She hadn’t let herself think about sex. About what she might gain with this marriage—like him.
Now her pulse tripped into a different kind of gallop. Still fearful, but anticipatory. He was a force, this man. He would never, ever be easy.
But all he had to do was touch her and she melted.
“No has always worked for me.” He touched her arm again, his touch light and the suggestion of invitation that she come closer even lighter. “As a safe word.”
She would never be safe with him.
She knew that without a doubt. She might have money, but he would always have the advantage of experience and control and less personal investment. Wasn’t that the definition of her life, though? Whether it was Niko’s power or her agent’s assessment of her talent or simply her daughter’s best interest, Kiara was forever giving or forgiving, allowing or enduring.
Except when it came to sex with Val. Tension was crawling across his cheekbones, some of it sexual, some of it dismay. He was reacting as inexorably as she was, and she didn’t think there could have been a stronger aphrodisiac. She might be helpless to the way he made her feel, but he suffered a similar reaction.
She was pretty sure.
Her instinct for creative discovery took over, governing her as she stepped forward. It was the same compulsion that gripped her when she was deep in the throes of painting, when something unexpected happened, but wasn’t a mistake.
This might be. She saw Val’s gaze dip to her mouth, saw the sway in him the way a redwood rocked in the wind, trying to withstand a force that could topple it.
Yearning curled with eagerness in her belly as she waited.
With a soft curse, he dropped his head and covered her lips with his, releasing a pained noise into her mouth as he did it.
A moan left her at the same time, one that was both a signal of welcome and a noise of agony at the intense sensation of lips scraping hers. A damp lick—hers—and the friction became a glide. Heat expanded down her throat and across her chest, prickling her nipples to life. Her hand found his stubbled cheek and encouraged him even as his arms wrapped around her and locked her into a tight embrace that squeezed the air from her lungs.
His kiss was devastating. His hand cradled the back of her head, fingers massaging through her hair while he worshipped her mouth. He made love to it so blatantly, a flash flood of heat went straight to her loins. Her knees weakened and she clung all the tighter to him, hips tilting forward, seeking the pressure of him where she ached.
He dragged his head up and his unsteady breaths moved his chest against hers as he walked her backward to the bed.
“Are you going to say it?” he growled.
“What?” She stumbled over her own feet, grasping at his arms to keep her balance.
“Our safe word.”
Her tongue went to the space behind her front teeth. Realization struck with a pang of helpless humor along with confusion and a rather tender, frightening feeling because as unwise as this was, it felt incredibly right. A quivery, joyous sensation had lodged itself somewhere between her heart and her stomach.
“I’m taking everything,” he warned. “Unless you say it.”
“Me?” she asked, sinking onto the edge of the mattress because her knees wouldn’t hold her. Her agonized gaze pinning to the spot in his throat where his carotid artery pulsed, confident and strong. “Why? To prove I can’t resist you?”
“To prove I can still make you scream.”
A squeaking sob escaped her, and she continued to hold his arm as he slowly began releasing the tiny buttons that closed the front of her dress.
She wanted him to kiss her again, blank out her mind so her surrender wasn’t so blatant, but he was giving her every chance to voice that tiny word she couldn’t seem to find because now his hand was invading. Sliding with surety into her dress, under the cup of her bra, gathering the abundant swell of her breast and baring it.
Another growling noise escaped him, and he overwhelmed her then, pressing her back as he took her brown nipple into his mouth, wet and hot and ruthless.
He caused such a spear of pleasure into her loins; she bucked her hips against his weight.
He shifted, still pinning her, but drawing up the hem of her dress and dancing abstract patterns across her inner thighs until she was squeezing them together to try to ease the growing ache between them.
“This is happening too fast,” she gasped, clasping his head.
“Is it?” His voice sounded drugged and his eyelids were heavy as he raised his head. His hand stilled on her upper thigh. The branding heat of it made her intimate flesh throb. “I can smell how excited you are, Kiara.”
The tip of his nose circled hers and his erotic words against her lips sent a shower of tingles through her. The line of his own arousal dug into her hip.
“You don’t want my touch here?” His thumb skimmed ever so briefly against the line of her panties, causing a fresh release of dampening readiness into her aching folds. “My mouth?”
He grazed his lips against hers, teasing, not giving her the kiss her parted
mouth craved, only the flick of the tip of his tongue.
“Tell me what you want,” he said with dark command. “Say it and I will give it to you. I promise. I won’t make you beg. This time,” he added with a carnal smile.
Heaven help her, she did. She said something earthy and flagrant. He revealed his teeth in a wolfish, predatory smile, but in the next second smothered her with a kiss. Then he did as she’d asked, giving her his mouth all over her body, working his way down, exposing her other breast and lifting her skirt high enough to lick into her navel. Then he peeled away her panties and kissed the flesh he’d exposed.
He made her scream.
Then he said, “Louder,” and did it again.
* * *
“What are you doing?” Kiara’s voice was heavy with lassitude as he picked her up.
“I need a condom.” If he didn’t get inside her in the next sixty seconds he was going to go out of his mind.
“I’m too heavy.”
“Don’t insult me.” He shouldered into his own room and set her on his bed, rather enamored with the way her disheveled clothing exposed a shoulder and a breast. Her skirt rode up and the wrinkled silk told its own story. Her crushed hair and swollen eyelids made him want to push her knees apart and feast on her all over again.
He wrenched his shirt off then slowed as her gaze heated with lust. He popped the button on his jeans and lowered the zipper with care since he was aroused and, as always, commando.
She drew in a breath as he revealed that fact, gaze pinned to the flesh that was aching to thrust into the heat he’d tasted.
When she licked her lips and stared at him with unabashed craving, he had to squeeze himself to keep from losing control. A pang of pleasure-pain throbbed into the tip, warning him how close he was, but he couldn’t resist asking, “Want this?”
She swallowed and her eyes came up to his, her gaze full of vulnerability as she nodded.
This woman would be his undoing, he feared, but he moved closer and let her take him in her too-gentle grip. She was as tentative as she’d been that first night, but the caress of her tongue and the close of her lips and the light suction she applied was pure paradise.
He withstood it as long as he could, fists gripped onto her shoulders, weight pushing into his toes while his abs pulled into his spine.
Everything in him wanted to capitulate to her delicate torment, but he made himself press her back. He was in charge. Wasn’t he?
“Grazie, bella, but take off your clothes,” he said, barely recognizing his own voice, coming from such a deep place inside him. “I want all of you.”
He helped, skimming his fingers across her soft shoulders, bringing her to her feet again so her dress fell off her hips and onto the floor. She released her bra and it dropped away, too.
He feasted his gaze on every inch of her brown curves. The musky scent of sex was all around them and he started to reach for her, then remembered he needed a condom. He picked up his jeans for his wallet.
“I’m, um, still on the pill,” she said very softly. “A proper kind. But it’s okay if you want to use one,” she said as she watched him apply the latex. “To be sure.”
He did want to be sure, but as he pressed her onto the mattress beneath him, he wasn’t sure of anything anymore.
CHAPTER FIVE
THIS WAS HOW it had been that other time, Kiara thought distantly. The thrust of his body into hers stung, but she gloried in the sensation. In the sheer possessiveness of his action. In the power of his undulating form beneath her hands as they roamed over his back and hips and flexing butt.
Her senses were overloaded, but she loved it. And the pleasure, the abject joy that filled her as they writhed in the throes of lovemaking, was incomparable. It was raw and intimate and her defenses were nonexistent, but she had never felt more free. She released all the constraints within her, at one with him in a way she had never experienced with anyone in any other way except like this, with him.
Orgasm peaked sudden and sharp in her, pushing a cry of surprise from her throat.
He laughed and speared his hand into her hair, not pausing his rhythm as he nipped at her jaw.
“We can do better than that. I want you to weep, it’s so good.” He dragged her hands over her head and stretched her helpless beneath him while his busy mouth traversed dips and curves, finding all her erogenous zones, making her groan under the onslaught of pleasure.
Climax rose again, stronger. The next one was stronger still.
She said things then, things that were pleas for mercy and entreaties for more. She forgot everything she was. The only thing that mattered was the man who commanded her here, in this bed. She was his, utterly and completely his.
It should have terrified her.
And it did, later, when she came back to herself and realized how much power he had over her. But for now, she exulted in it.
* * *
“I hate the island,” Val said forcefully, hours later, when they had emerged from his room, sleepy and famished, to order room service and circle back to the discussion that had preceded Kiara’s forging herself onto him like iron filings to a magnet.
Kiara looked up from folding back the sleeve on her robe, shocked by the vehemence in his tone.
“Hate it,” he reiterated. “I didn’t go back when my own father was dying there. What makes you think I’ll go back tomorrow?”
“Your daughter?”
“My daughter can come to me. You want to go back. Why? Your studio?” He made it sound like a very lame excuse.
“Yes.” A deep quavering accosted her as she watched his eyes narrow the way a cat’s did when a bird landed nearby. If he’d had a tail, it would have flicked with predatory anticipation. “I can go alone,” she said, scooping saffron-flavored rice into her mouth.
“I’m not afraid, bella.”
Her heart skipped at the endearment even though he pronounced it with such lethal warning. “Then come with me,” she dared.
He snorted at her audacity and reached across to cup the side of her neck. The possessive action was enough to heat her blood afresh.
She understood then that she had placed herself in the palm of his hand. The sense of obligation Niko had held over her was nothing compared to the casual dominance Val could exert with a smoky look at her mouth or the sensual caress of his fingertip against her nape.
“You understand that you’re mine now? I respect the delicate artist within you, so I will give you this gift, but you will only bring what is truly yours. Nothing of that man will enter my house.”
Tears came into her eyes. She didn’t understand it, but its roots might have been in shame. Her allegiance was shifting—had shifted—to Val, whether he deserved her devotion or not. The hours of entrusting him with her body had left her feeling exactly as he’d said. His. And his hatred of Niko was so palpable, she felt disloyal for the years she’d spent with him.
“Say thank you.”
“Grazie,” she whispered, tentative with his language.
“I like hearing Italian from your swollen lips. And you’re very pretty with your limpid eyes and whisker-burned chin but come here and say it properly.” He pushed his chair back and his robe parted, exposing his chest and stomach and the thickening flesh between his powerful thighs.
She went.
* * *
Val’s heart iced over as the enormous villa came into view and continued to harden as the helicopter landed on the pad behind it, exactly as it had four times a year when he’d been a child.
Run up to the green chair. Whoever gets there first can have cake.
Let them fight. Boys will be boys.
Why are you making trouble? That’s a good school. Be grateful for the lesson.
He kept his mirrored aviators on as they disembarked, but the blinding white walls of the villa st
ill hurt his eyes. His first breath of island air propelled him back in time, provoking an old, sick tension in his gut that warned him he would disappoint no matter what he did or how hard he tried.
The sprawling, three-story building had been kept well, but looked smaller than he remembered. Had there always been only six steps up to the back door? Why had it always felt like a full flight to the gallows?
“Ready?” Kiara asked beside him.
He had bought her a new dress and yes, it had been a means of stamping his possession on her, but he had wanted to see her in a brighter color. The chartreuse green accentuated her dark eyes and made her skin glow.
Maybe it was all the sex. Few women matched his appetite, but after they’d exhausted each other into a deep sleep, she had turned to him early this morning, hands sliding without hesitation beneath the sheets to wake him.
“Don’t gloat,” she had pleaded.
His mouth had quickly been too busy for that and he was too irritated with himself for giving in and coming here to do anything of the kind now.
“Being here doesn’t require plucking up courage,” he said flatly. “It’s more about suppressing the urge to vomit.”
“That’s not what I meant. Are you ready for—”
The door opened and a woman with a toddler in her arms said, “We heard the helicopter.”
“Mummy!” Aurelia launched herself at Kiara. “I mitt you!”
“Oh, lovey.” Kiara caught the sprite and hugged her tight, swiveling back and forth as she did. “I missed you, too.”
Val wasn’t ready. Seeing Aurelia on screen hadn’t prepared him for the aura of sheer joy that seemed to radiate off her as she pulled back, tiny arms and legs clinging to Kiara while they exchanged a peck.
“I’ll keep her with me,” Kiara said to the woman Val realized was the nanny. “You can finish packing.”
The young woman nodded and disappeared.
“Where did you go?” Aurelia asked, still on Kiara’s hip.