by Penny Jordan
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHARLEY looked up from the weekly progress chart she had been studying. It was three weeks now since Raphael had brought her back to the palazzo and left her there. She pushed back her chair from the pretty, delicately painted wood desk. She had been uncertain at first how Raphael would feel about the fact that Anna had given her as her office the pretty little sitting room which she had told her had last been used by Raphael’s mother, but Anna had assured her that he wouldn’t mind, that he had told her simply to make sure that Charley had somewhere to work.
Three weeks: twenty-one nights of unbearable aching longing, and twenty-one days of fighting to keep Raphael out of her thoughts.
She had had three wonderful days with him in Florence. Those she would never, ever forget. Three wonderful days and three even more wonderful nights: days during which Raphael had shown her his Florence, and nights when he had shown her the power of her own sexuality.
He might not have been a demonstrative lover in public, holding her hand and pulling her to him as she had seen one young man doing with his girl in the Boboli Gardens the afternoon Raphael had taken her there, but he had showed his desire for her in other more subtle ways—via a certain look, a certain touch—and there had definitely been no holding back from showing her his desire when they were on their own.
On their final morning before they had left the city she had been lying in his arms, after Raphael had made love to her. He had kissed her and smoothed the hair back off her face, telling her, ‘You do understand, don’t you, that what has happened here between us in Florence must belong only to Florence?’
Yes, she had understood—but that hadn’t stopped her from asking him, almost begging him in desperation, even though she had already known what his answer would be, ‘Will we come back?’
‘No,’ he had told her, with a finality that had cut into her like a knife slicing into her heart.
She had known, of course, that that would be his answer. He had told her from the start not to want anything more than they had had. Then she hadn’t thought about the future—then she had been too driven by her desire for him to look deeper and see what was already growing beneath it. Then she hadn’t realised that she had fallen in love with him. Not then, but she did now.
It wasn’t Raphael’s fault. It was her own. But knowing that didn’t make her pain any easier to bear. She had tried to escape it by spending all her waking hours working. She was almost always the first at the garden in the morning and the last to leave at the end of the day, returning to the palazzo to write reports late into the evening, but not even that could keep Raphael out of her thoughts. He was there all the time, overshadowing everything else, and Charley knew that he always would be.
The nights were worse than the days. She’d delay going to bed until the early hours, convinced that she would be so exhausted that she would sleep, and she did. But only for a while, waking up often to find her pillow wet with her tears, her body and her heart aching for Raphael.
Charley looked round the pretty, feminine salon. Whenever she imagined Raphael’s mother here, perhaps sitting at the desk where Charley herself worked, writing her letters, another image would appear: Raphael himself as a young boy. Her heart turned over inside her chest, a yearning spreading through her. Now she could understand, as she had never understood before, the need of a woman to conceive the child of the man she loved. To have that child as a living, breathing memorial of what they had shared, to be loved and cherished as a precious gift.
But of course there could be no such gift for her. Her all too brief span of time in the paradise that being Raphael’s lover had created for her was over. Raphael himself had closed the gates on their return.
Wearily Charley looked down at the desk. It was far too small really, for the amount of paperwork she had to deal with, but Anna had offered her this room so proudly that Charley hadn’t had the heart to tell the housekeeper that she needed a working space that was more functional.
So far they were ahead of schedule with the work of clearing the garden in readiness for the actual renovation—although Charley suspected that sometimes the contractors would have preferred it if she didn’t put in such long hours, assessing the progress of everything. But working herself hard was the only way she had of trying to stop the pain of loving Raphael.
In a few minutes she would go downstairs and drive out to the site, and then this evening she would update her schedules for the week and input them into her computer, ready to send to Raphael with her report as she had done for the previous three weeks. So far, though, Raphael had not e-mailed her back—not even to say that he had received her reports. Because he was afraid that if he contacted her she would plead with him as she had done in Florence? It was Charley’s prayer that she would never humiliate herself and irritate Raphael by doing that.
There were moments when she longed for the comforting presence of her sisters, so that she could unburden herself to them and be comforted by them, but then there were other times when she simply couldn’t bear the thought of disclosing her pain and the reasons for it to anyone, because it was so raw.
‘All the statues have now been removed. Those that are only slightly damaged will be repaired in my workshops in Florence, whilst those that cannot will be measured and photographed so that exact copies can be made.’
Charley nodded her head as she listened to Niccolo giving her his progress report. It had been a long day, and now the warmth was dying out of the sun as it sank towards the horizon.
‘You’ll let me have a detailed report to pass on to Raphael?’
‘Of course. No work will be done until he has sanctioned it. As you know, we’ve already photographed each piece of statuary, and the location where it was found.’
Charley nodded her head again. She too had taken photographs of everything, meticulously numbering them and pinpointing the sites on her own personal plan of the garden. She wasn’t going to take any chances of being found wanting in her professional capacity, even if Raphael had found her not good enough to keep in his bed.
‘We are doing very well. Raphael will have every reason to be extremely pleased with our progress,’ Niccolo told her, as he left to return to Florence.
Half an hour later Charley too was ready to call it a day. The last rays of the setting sun were fading as she locked the heavy gates. It would be dark by the time she returned to the palazzo, where she would shower and eat and then start work on her evening’s paperwork.
Since it was Friday, once she had updated everything she could e-mail it to Raphael—her treat of the week, her only precious contact with him. Just thinking about e-mailing him made her stomach muscles cramp with a mixture of pain and longing—and the desperate hope that he would e-mail her back.
How pathetic she was, Charley derided herself contemptuously. She looked towards the small Fiat Raphael had given her to drive, and then looked again in disbelief when she saw the sleek sports car parked next to it.
‘Raphael…’ Without thinking, desperate to get to him, she stepped into the road, oblivious to the car coming towards her until she heard the blare of its horn.
Raphael was out of the Ferrari in a flash, running faster than he had ever run in his life, grabbing hold of Charley and dragging her bodily out of the way as the car swerved to avoid her.
Charley felt the heat of its engine, the sting of the stones it threw up on her skin, and she heard the curses of the driver—but none of that mattered. All that mattered was that she was with Raphael. But he was shaking her, violently and almost painfully, over and over again, his face drained of colour, his hands hard on her arms as he demanded furiously, ‘Why didn’t you look before you crossed the road? Are you blind? What were you trying to do? Kill yourself?’
Charley had never seen him so angry. She could almost feel the heat and the power of his rage.
Shocked and frightened, more by her near-miss than by his anger, she trembled in his hold and begged him, �
�Stop it.’
Immediately Raphael thrust her away from him, so hard that she staggered, and then leaned on the side of his car.
Reaction had begun to set in, reducing her to a shaking bundle of jelly-legged awareness of the danger she had been in.
‘Get in,’ Raphael ordered her, yanking open the door.
‘I’ve got my own car,’ Charley reminded him, but the last thing she felt like doing was driving.
‘I’ll arrange for that to be collected later.’
She was in the car, still feeling shaky and sick, wanting Raphael to hold her tenderly and comfortingly instead of being angry with her.
Raphael drove them back to the palazzo at speed, without speaking to her, and Charley was glad to be able to escape from him once they were inside, hurrying up to her room, wincing as she heard the furious slam of his office door on her way upstairs.
Ten minutes later, standing under the warm sting of the shower, Charley began to feel slightly better. Her shock had receded, leaving her to admit that she had been careless, and that she was lucky that Raphael had acted so speedily to save her from going under the wheels of the car. That was what loving the wrong man did for you. It made you so desperate to be with him that you forgot everything else. She had to find a way to stop herself from loving him. She must.
Wrapping a towel round her wet body, she headed for the bedroom—and then came to an abrupt halt when she saw Raphael standing there, waiting for her.
He was still angry. She could see that immediately.
‘I’m sorry—’ she began, but he stopped her.
‘Sorry? Is that all you can say?’ he demanded harshly. ‘You damn nearly kill yourself and…’ He was reaching for her again, but Charley stepped back from him.
‘No!’ she uttered, panicking, not trusting herself to let him touch her, knowing that if he did she would end up begging him to stay with her.
Her denial was too much for Raphael. His heart was still thudding with the agony he had felt when he had thought the car would hit her. Everything he had told himself and taught himself was forgotten. He was a man denied what was rightfully his, the woman who was rightfully his—the woman fate had devised for him and bequeathed to him, the woman whose only previous ‘no’ to him had been a plea for him not to leave her.
Charley could almost feel Raphael’s tension. It showed in his abrupt movements and in the dark grimness of his eyes, as though he was only just managing to hold back whatever it was that had turned them that colour. He looked…he looked like a man filled with suppressed anger, Charley recognised. And as he came towards her he was looking at her as though she was the source and the cause of that anger.
‘What is it?’ she asked apprehensively.
‘What is it? It’s this,’ Raphael answered savagely, reaching for her, pulling her against his body and then bending his head to kiss her. Not as he had kissed her before, not as she had dreamed of him kissing her, but over and over again, as though he couldn’t stop. Fierce, hard, demanding kisses, filled with a raw and angry pent-up passion that seared through her, igniting inside her an answering, equally primitive need.
Charley lost all sense of time as she clung to him, riding out the storm, letting him take what he wanted, glorying in the hard, imprisoning hold of his hands on her body that made her his willing captive. But at last she somehow managed to pull herself away from him to warn him, ‘Anna will be bringing my supper.’
‘Not now,’ he told her, pulling her back towards him, his hand finding her bare thigh beneath her towel and caressing it, making her quiver with a thrill of yearning pleasure. ‘I told Anna we are not to be disturbed. Your hunger for your supper will, I am afraid, have to go unsatisfied, because my hunger for you cannot bear any further delay.’
His hand had reached the top of her thigh; his voice was thick with emotion. Her heart was pounding with wild, out-of-control euphoria. He wanted her. Raphael wanted her.
Charlotte pressed herself closer to him in eager delight, another thrill running through her when he groaned and kissed her fiercely, the open agony of his longing matching everything that she herself felt.
Their mutual need was like a fireball, consuming them. Raphael was shedding his clothes as he caressed her with increasing urgency and intimacy. There was no time for the slow sensuality of leisurely love play, and no need either, Charley acknowledged. How could there be when she had spent the last three weeks aching for him? An ache that had become a tumultuous clamour of pulsing need, possessing the whole of her body even before she had seen how his hunger for her had brought Raphael to full and thick readiness. It was the sight of that readiness that sent her over the edge and into a place of wild, visceral need.
She could see the hot look of male urgency glittering in Raphael’s eyes as he parted her naked thighs, the heat of his hand against her sex making her moan. The sound changed to a fevered gasp of almost too heightened pleasure when his fingers stroked the eager waiting length of her sex.
‘I’ve lain awake night after night thinking of you like this—sweet and hot, wet and ready for me.’
Just the sound of his voice was enough to make her body convulse with longing.
There was no time for them to reach the bed—no thought in her head other than the need to have Raphael deep within her, filling her, completing her, driving her with each wonderfully powerful thrust of his body closer to the epicentre of the storm within her… Her legs wrapped around Raphael, her fingernails digging deep into his shoulders. His hands protected her back from the hardness of the bedroom door as they coupled wildly and fiercely. Charley could feel her body’s possessive hunger for him as her muscles tightened around him, demanding that he take her deeper, harder, faster. Words formed by her aching need were gasped against his shoulder, his sweat-dampened throat. She could smell the aroused heat of his body, taste his need in the salty tang of his skin.
The end came quickly and almost violently, in a series of frantic mini-orgasms for Charley that built in intensity until Raphael tensed and made an agonised sound of release against her skin, his completion within her inciting a final orgasm that took her to new heights and held her there, whilst her body convulsed on wave after wave of pleasure.
Drained and trembling, Charley unwrapped her legs from Raphael’s body, too weak to stand unsupported on her own, simply leaning into him as he held her, their hearts pounding together in the aftermath of what they had shared.
They had eaten, showered, made love again—this time with Raphael slowly building her desire with sensuality and an awareness of her needs that had brought tears of emotion to her eyes.
‘Stay with me,’ Charley whispered as Raphael held her protectively in the curve of his body, and they both knew that it wasn’t just for tonight that she wanted him to stay.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A SHADOW blotted out the morning sunlight warming her face, causing Charley to murmur a protest in her sleep. Just as she had done earlier, when he’d eased her out of his arms so that he could shower and dress, Raphael noted. The morning light fell harshly against the planes of his face, revealing a certain gauntness and weariness of spirit. He shouldn’t have come here last night—shouldn’t have left the safety of Rome even though it had become an imprisoning barren waste of aching. He had no right to take what he had given his vow to himself not to.
The temptation to simply walk away whilst Charlotte slept was almost overwhelming, but he made himself overcome it, leaning down to place his hand on her body—not on her bare rounded shoulder; he was far too raw to be able to trust himself to touch her skin to skin. Instead he placed his hand gently on the spot where her arm lay beneath the bedclothes.
Charley woke up immediately, her sleepy gaze sharpening into focus, delight brimming in it as she sat up, exclaiming, ‘Raphael!’
Everything about her demeanour spoke openly and joyously of her feelings. Raphael could see her love for him in the way she smiled at him, hear it in the upward lilt of her voice, fee
l it in the softly sensuous yearning movement of her body towards him.
He drew in a sharp breath and stepped back from the bed, turning away from her to look towards the window as he told her, ‘I shall be returning to Rome in half an hour, but first I need to talk to you about last night.’
Charley felt the weight of his words as though they were the onset of an avalanche that was going to crush the life out of her. In the short space of time it took Raphael to say them, the happiness with which she had awoken had turned to fear.
‘Last night?’ she repeated.
Raphael nodded his head.
‘Last night should never have happened. The blame for the fact that it did lies entirely with me. I should have had more self-control; I should not have come here and given in to my…need. It mustn’t happen again. It will not happen again.’
Charley couldn’t hide her distressed anguish.
‘I don’t understand,’ she protested. ‘You want me, and I want you.’
‘Yes.’
Raphael’s voice was terse. He wasn’t looking at her, and Charley could see the way his jaw tensed.
‘Then why can’t we be together? I love you, Raphael.’
‘Yes, I know, and that is part of the reason why it must end. I cannot give you… There is no future for us. It is better, kinder, fairer to you, that we end things now.’
No future for them? Pain and anger filled Charley.
‘Why is there no future for us? Because I’m not good enough for you, The Duke? Is that why you said what you did about me not conceiving your child? I’m not good enough to be the mother of a baby with your precious blue blood, is that it?’
She was working herself up into a fury because it was the only way she had of stopping herself from begging him to change his mind. She had to hold on to her anger because it was all she had to cling to.