by Lynne Graham
‘So...’ Rocco was studying her as she imagined he would study an opponent in the boardroom. With a cool, incisive intensity that sought to read the thoughts on her face. ‘Do I go...or do I stay?’
No, it really wasn’t the moment to ask him how he felt about being a father and, since it was his fault she had fallen pregnant in the first place, he was really just going to have to come to terms with Freddy. Oh, yes, Rocco, she thought with helpless tender amusement, unlike you once assured me, it is that easy to get pregnant. He might reign supreme in every other corner of his organised, fast-moving existence, but fate had had the last laugh in the field of conception.
‘You’ve got a big smile in your beautiful eyes,’ Rocco drawled with a wolfish grin that twisted her vulnerable heart.
He jerked loose his silk tie.
‘You could be taking a lot for granted,’ she said, trying to play it cool.
‘I took you for granted until I had to get by without you. When I saw you last night, I became a very fast learner,’ Rocco asserted, shimmying his wide shoulders back with easy grace and casting off his superb tailored suit jacket.
‘No servants here, Rocco... I’m not picking up after you,’ Amber whispered, heart hurling itself against her ribcage, making her feel dizzy.
Rocco vented a rueful laugh. ‘So I’m not tidy.’
It had been so long since she’d heard him laugh like that, she wanted to tape him; she wanted to capture the moment, stop time dead, just look, listen, rejoice. She picked up his jacket; she couldn’t help it. She couldn’t bear to see expensive clothes treated like rags of no account. She hugged his jacket to her, happiness beginning to soar like a bird taking flight inside her. Thank you, God, she chanted with silent fervour, thank you.
As far as she was concerned, Rocco’s slate of sins was wiped clean. Within the space of twenty-four hours, Rocco had transformed himself from being a stubborn, angry, unforgiving louse full of wild allegations back into the charismatic lover she had lost. Hadn’t he just said that he had taken her for granted until he had had to get by without her? Had he been too proud to seek her out after his anger had ebbed?
He flung his shirt on the chair where she was draping his jacket. She gave him a sunny smile of approval. ‘Did you drive yourself down here? Where’s your car?’ she asked.
‘Parked in the back lane...this is like having an illicit assignation.’
She tensed. ‘And how much do you know about that?’
‘I don’t mess around with married women.’
At that grounding admission, a little of her buoyancy ebbed. ‘But you haven’t exactly spent the past eighteen months pining...let’s be frank.’
Stilling, Rocco sent her a slanting glance of scorching hunger.
She was vaguely surprised that her towel didn’t go up in flames, but the pain she was suppressing wouldn’t let go of her. ‘Stop evading the issue...’
A faint rise of dark blood accentuated his fabulous high cheekbones. His equally fabulous mouth tautened. ‘I was on the rebound...I was trying to replace you. I don’t want to talk about that,’ he completed with brooding abruptness, lush black lashes lifting, stormy golden eyes challenging her.
Was that guilt or regret she was hearing? Or back off, mind your own business? Amber turned away. A split second later, he was behind her, tugging her back against him with possessive hands. ‘So how many other men have there been?’ he said in the same tone he might have utilised to read a weather report, but his big powerful frame was so tense it betrayed him.
‘Back off...mind your own business,’ Amber heard herself say.
‘But—’
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ She flung back the same words he had given her.
‘Sooner or later you’ll tell me,’ Rocco forecast, and swept her right off her feet in a startling demonstration of his superior strength to carry her over to her own bed. ‘You tell me everything.’
‘Not quite everything...no one tells everything.’
He settled her down on the bed and then lifted her again to yank the duvet from beneath her. He came down beside her, like a vibrant bronze image of raw masculinity, and detached the tuck on her towel with long brown fingers. Smouldering tawny eyes scanned her hectically flushed face. ‘I’ll get it out of you, tabbycat.’
She lifted an unsteady hand to trace the course of one hard, angular cheekbone. ‘Don’t call me that unless you mean it,’ she whispered helplessly. ‘I don’t want you hurting me again.’
He caught her fingers and kissed them, ridiculously long inky lashes screening his gaze from her. ‘I would never set out to hurt you and I never say anything I don’t mean.’
In receipt of those assurances, her attack of insecurity ebbed, but she was already very conscious of her own intense vulnerability. She had got by without Rocco by persuading herself that she hated him. Now the scary truth was blinding her. She was still crazy about him. Her barriers were down. Putting them back up would be impossible for her a second time.
CHAPTER SIX
‘YOU’RE so serious, cara,’ Rocco censured huskily.
And tonight, ‘serious’ was obviously not what was required, Amber interpreted without much difficulty. That wasn’t like him, she thought uneasily, but she suppressed that suspicion and concentrated instead on being seriously happy.
‘Smile...’ Rocco urged, tumbling her back into the pillows and arranging himself over her, so that not one inch of her was bare of his potent presence.
Amber smiled brighter than the sun because she was with him again. He kissed her in reward. She even tried to smile under his marauding mouth and her heart sang, her senses flowering to the taste and the touch and the scent of him again. Every fibre of her being was on a knife edge of delicious anticipation.
He found her breasts with a husky sound in the back of his throat that was incredibly sexy. Her sensitised flesh swelled into his shaping palms and she trembled in response. He rested appreciative eyes on the full, pouting mounds. ‘I swear that though the rest of you has got thinner, your gorgeous breasts...per amor di Dio—just looking at you makes me ache,’ he ground out with thickened fervour. ‘You’re every erotic dream I have ever had, cara.’
Amber was aware that pregnancy had changed her shape. She tensed, but Rocco chose that exact same moment to give way to temptation and send his dark head swooping down to capture a throbbing pink nipple in his mouth. Her ability to think was wrenched from her at speed. Her eyes squeezed tight shut and her spine arched. As he teased at the stiff, tender buds begging for his attention, nothing existed for her for long, timeless moments but the all-encompassing surge of her own writhing response. She had always been intensely sensitive there. Pulsing waves of intense pleasure cascaded through her quivering body as she yielded to his erotic mastery.
‘I missed you so much...’ she gasped, mouth dry, throat tight, breathing a challenge.
He reclaimed her reddened lips with fierce, plundering passion, his hands knotting into her damp honey-blonde hair, lifting her to him as if he could never get enough of her. His tongue delved deep into her mouth and her thighs clenched together on a need that already felt shockingly intolerable. He kissed her until she was moaning and clinging to him and he only paused to catch his own breath.
He studied her passion-glazed eyes with intense male satisfaction. ‘When I saw you getting out of that car this morning, I felt violent,’ he declared with raw force as he shifted with innate eroticism against her, acquainting her with the bold, hot proof of his hard arousal. ‘I wanted to rip that guy out of his Merc and beat him to a pulp. Then I wanted to drag you off like a caveman and imprint myself so deeply on you that you would never look at another man again!’
‘Neville’s my brother-in-law,’ Amber reminded him, aghast.
‘They can’t all have been relatives—
’
As Rocco loomed over her, all domineering male, Amber ran worshipping hands up over his magnificent hair-roughened torso, adoring the hard strength and beauty of him, and he shivered, rippling muscles pulling taut. But shimmering stubborn golden eyes still gazed down into hers. ‘I only want a number...I’ve no wish to talk about them—’
‘No...someone as possessive as you are doesn’t want a number either,’ Amber whispered, a rueful giggle tugging at her vocal cords, even as his hand tightened on her hip and dragged her closer and her wanton body turned liquid as heated honey.
‘Ballpark figure?’ he pressed with roughened determination.
Amber exerted pressure on his big brown shoulders to tug him back to her again. It would be so easy to admit that there had never been anyone else, but the mean streak in her wouldn’t let her tell him that yet. If, and when, he deserved that honesty.
‘Dio mio...it’s driving me crazy thinking about you with other—’
‘Shush...’ Amber came up on one elbow and pressed her tingling mouth to his again.
Rocco went rigid and then he vented a hungry groan and he responded with devastating, driving sensuality. She laced her fingers into his thick, tousled hair, weak and quivering with a hunger as unstoppable as a floodtide. Every time her sensitised skin came into glancing contact with any part of his lean, hard frame, the heat building inside her and the tormenting ache for fulfilment increased.
‘Rocco...’ she moaned as he thumbed the aching buds of her breasts and lingered there, giving her ruthless pleasure with indolent ease.
Skimming sure fingers through the silky fleece of curls at the junction of her thighs, he pressed his carnal mouth to the tiny pulse flickering at her collarbone, making every skin-cell leap. Her blood started roaring through her veins, her heart thundering in her own ears. As he explored the hot, damp welcome awaiting him, she could not stay still and all control was taken from her. There was only Rocco and what he was doing to her with such exquisite expertise, the burning need that sent her hips rising from the bed, the choked sounds wrenched from her with ever greater frequency.
‘Please...’ she sobbed.
He pulled her under him, spread her thighs with an urgency that betrayed his own urgent need. She collided with feverish golden eyes and a great wave of love infused her.
‘I never thought I would be with you again...’ Rocco groaned with raw, feeling intensity as he tipped her up and drove deep into her moist satin sheath.
She arched up to receive him, a stunned cry of response torn from her for she had forgotten just how incredible he could make her feel, forgotten that bold sensation of being stretched to accommodate him. He set a pagan rhythm and with every fluid thrust he excited her beyond bearing. Every hot, abandoned inch of her revelled in his strength and masculine dominance. His passionate force drove her wild with excitement until at last he allowed her to surge over the final threshold. That shattering climax felt endless to her, splintering through her writhing body in long, ecstatic waves of release. Utterly lost in him, mindless with delight, she whimpered and clung as he shuddered over her and slammed into her one last time with a harsh groan of very male pleasure.
‘Nobody can make me feel like you do, tabbycat...’ Rocco vented an indolent sigh of satisfaction. Smoothing her hair from her brow, he stole a tender, lingering kiss from her swollen lips and hugged her close.
She kissed his shoulder, drowning in the hot, damp smell of his skin, loving him. It felt like coming home. She could not credit that he had only come back into her life the night before, for it now felt to her as though they had never been apart...as though the whole dreadful nightmare of that cheap and sleazy spread in a down-market newspaper had never happened. ‘When did you start appreciating that I must have been set up by Dinah Fletcher?’ she murmured curiously.
His big, powerful frame tensed. Lifting his tousled fair head, he rested dark as midnight eyes on her, superb bronzed bone-structure taut. He was still in her arms but she recognised his instantaneous withdrawal by the impassivity of his gaze. It was as if he had slammed a door in her face. ‘We haven’t got time to talk. I have to be out of here in fifteen minutes.’
As Rocco rolled free of her and sprang out of bed, Amber was stunned. ‘You have to be out of here in fifteen minutes?’
‘What began as an excuse to extract me from this weekend early turned into the real McCoy,’ Rocco quipped on his way out of the room. ‘I have to work out a rescue package for a hotel chain which belongs to friends of mine by Tuesday.’
Obviously he had known that before he’d come to see her. She just wished he had mentioned how little time he had to spend with her. On the one hand, she felt hurt and disappointed, but she was also aware that Rocco’s talents were always very much in demand. It was also exactly like him to drop everything to go to the assistance of a friend. She listened to the shower running, knew he would find very little, if any, hot water.
‘I’m not a fan of primitive plumbing, cara,’ Rocco commented with a feeling shudder on his return to the bedroom. ‘I’ll organise a car to move you out of here tomorrow.’
‘Move me out...of here?’ Amber prompted unevenly, immediately wondering if he was asking her to live with him and wondering how she would answer him if that was what he meant. Everything felt as if it was happening way too fast for common sense, but it had always been like that with Rocco.
Rocco dropped the towel wrapped round his lean brown hips. Attention straying, she swallowed hard. He was magnificent: the lean, muscular power of a very fit male laced with the overwhelming appeal of a very sexual animal. Her cheeks burned. He was drop-dead gorgeous but gaping at him made her feel embarrassed for herself in spite of the renewed intimacy between them.
‘I have to come clean with you,’ Rocco murmured with rueful emphasis. ‘I’m afraid I overreacted when I first realised you were working for the Wintons yesterday...’
Amber nodded agreement, glad he was admitting that reality.
His expressive mouth tightened and then he breathed in deep. ‘But by the time you came indoors to reason with me, I had already called Harris and warned him that you might only be marking time here in search of a story worth selling.’
Amber turned pale with horror at that most belated confession.
‘I’m sorry.’ Rocco spoiled his seemingly sincere apology, however, by adding, ‘But it’s not really a problem now, is it?’
‘What did Mr Winton say?’ Amber demanded tensely, only now recalling how cool the older man had been with her earlier in the day, but she hadn’t even suspected that there might have been anything personal in his apparent preoccupation.
‘He’ll be looking for grounds to sack you and get you off his property as fast as possible.’ Rocco followed that devastating assurance with a shrug of incredible cool. ‘But since this is not a convenient neck of the woods for you to live when I’m based in London when I am in the UK, it hardly matters—’
‘It hardly matters...’ Amber parroted in a shattered tone of disbelief. ‘You tell me that you’ve virtually got me the sack and that I’m likely to be kicked out of this cottage...and you think that’s no big deal?’
Rocco elevated a dark, imperious brow. ‘Like you really love that wheelbarrow and living in this dump!’ he derided.
‘I won’t even dignify that with an answer!’ she said in reproach, appalled by his seeming indifference to the plight he had put her in.
His white shirt hanging open on his bronzed, hair-roughened chest, Rocco strolled over to the bed and crouched down to her level. Tawny eyes rested on her shaken and furious face. He closed his big hands over hers, strenuously ignoring her attempt to pull free of his grasp. ‘It goes without saying that, from this moment on, I will take care of all your expenses so you really do have nothing at all to worry about.’
She stared back at him in aston
ishment.
Rocco released his hold on her and lifted lean brown fingers to brush her hair back from one taut cheekbone in a soothing, but nonetheless very confident, gesture of intimacy. ‘It’s the only thing that makes sense and you know it—’
Pale as death, Amber compressed bloodless lips, but she couldn’t stop herself trembling. ‘You never brought money into our relationship before—’
His lean, powerful face clenched. ‘It was a different relationship.’
‘Different?’ Amber echoed and she could hear her own voice fading away on her, for this terrible fear was building inside her that she had entirely misunderstood what he had meant by coming back to her.
In an abrupt movement, Rocco vaulted back upright again.
The silence stretched into infinity.
‘Explain that word “different” to me,’ Amber whispered tightly.
‘It would be hard to quantify it.’
‘Oh, I think I can quantify it for you,’ Amber muttered in an agony of humiliation, but she didn’t speak her thoughts aloud. She had given him sex and he had come back for more sex and the foreseeable future would include only very much more of the same. Being a wanton in the woods had rebounded on her. He thought he could have her back on any terms now.
‘We can’t pretend the past never happened. Naturally things have changed. But there’s nothing wrong with my wish to look after you.’
‘Look after me...with a view to what in the future?’ Amber asked shakily.
Rocco chose that exact moment to turn his back to her searching eyes and duck down low enough to use the dressing mirror and straighten his tie. ‘Whatever happens, I’ll be there for you. I don’t turn my back on my responsibilities. You’re making a fuss about nothing.’
Amber was so crushed she couldn’t think straight. She was thinking of Freddy: Freddy who was very much Rocco’s responsibility. Somehow Amber did not think that Rocco would be quite so keen to reacquire a lover who had already given birth to his child.