by Penny Jordan
‘What did you do with it?’
‘Don’t worry, it’s quite safe and in one piece, with all its legs intact. I put it out of the window.’
‘You must think I’m a total idiot.’
‘You’re a woman,’ he told her. ‘You’re allowed to be—’
‘An idiot?’ she challenged him.
‘Afraid of spiders,’ he corrected her.
‘Thanks for...for what you did. My brothers would have laughed.’
She looked up at him. Now that the spider had been removed and her terror had eased, she was beginning to feel acutely self-conscious. She had been naked in the shower, after all, and he had picked her up and...
‘Your shirt’s all wet now.’ Her voice had gone husky, and her gaze was fastened on his torso, her heart thudding in a primitive beat that her body recognised and her mind shied away from in shock.
Alessandro shrugged. Wrapped in a towel, her hair tousled and her lips still trembling slightly from shock, she looked far too enticing. He watched as she touched the tip of her tongue to her lips, her gaze still concentrated on his body. Immediately he felt his own banked-down desire kick into fierce life as it recognised the subtle message she was giving him. He might have told himself that there must not be any intimacy between them, but that had been before he had seen her in Falcon’s embrace and known that the only male arms he was prepared to tolerate seeing wrapped around her were his own.
‘Then perhaps I’d better take it off. Or, even better, why don’t you take it off for me?’
Leonora exhaled on an unsteady breath of intense longing. She didn’t know how she had got to this point, but now that she was here she knew that she didn’t want to turn back.
‘I’m not very good at this kind of thing,’ she warned him.
Alessandro looked at her.
‘Liar,’ he told her softly as he went to her. ‘My body says that you are very good at it indeed.’
He was lifting her bodily out of the chair in which he had placed her when he had rescued her from the shower, only this time without the towel. He had pushed it aside, his hands warm and firm on her bare skin, his confidence putting to flight her own untutored hesitancy, compelling her body to recognise in his touch his right of possession.
As he carried her over to the bed she put one arm around his neck, her hand resting against his nape whilst the other instinctively slid inside his open shirt. His chest felt warm and hard, the sensation of muscle packed tight beneath male flesh causing the anticipation already curling through her belly to intensify into a low-lying persistent ache of need. She could feel that need burning, spreading through her, swelling her breasts and tightening her nipples. The fingers of the hand resting against his nape slid into the thick darkness of Alessandro’s hair as she looked up at his mouth, her lips parting breathlessly. All her senses seemed to be intensified, her sensual awareness heightened, the mere smell of his skin an aphrodisiac so powerful that it made her weak with longing.
Just the way Leonora was looking at him was having a similar effect to raw spirit taken on a battle-hardened empty stomach, Alessandro recognised, filling him with a surge of primitive testosterone-fuelled male energy far too powerful and all-consuming to be contained by any barriers. Like Mount Etna at its most dangerous, it defied and mocked the frailty of a mere man’s attempt to suppress it.
He had reached the bed, but instead of placing Leonora on it he continued to hold her, sitting down on the edge of the bed with her in his arms whilst he accepted the offering of her parted lips, his tongue thrusting deeply and fiercely into the hot, wild intimacy of her kiss, his free hand going to her breast to savour the erotic pleasure of the contrast between the globe’s full softness and the tight, hard demand of her swollen nipple.
A wild shudder ripped through Leonora’s body, arching her upwards in a mute appeal that begged for more, and she was answered by a thick groan of male enjoyment from Alessandro as he responded to her need, continuing to kiss her whilst he brought her flesh to helpless surrender with the skilled touch of his fingers against her eager nipple.
Just when his hand had left her breast to cover her sex with an immediacy that matched perfectly her own desire she had no idea. All she did know was that—blissfully—its weight against the mound of flesh within which an increasingly frantic longing pulsed brought her a momentary relief that was quickly replaced by an even more intense desire.
Breaking their kiss to look down at Leonora’s naked body, Alessandro felt his being gripped with urgency. Her nipples demanded the servitude of his lips. The sensual relaxation of her thighs into her own desire invited the probe of his thumb against the top of the sweetly closed outer lips to her sex, into the liquid heat they enclosed.
Leonora moaned—a long, slow, sweet sound of female pleasure rising from deep within her, mirroring the crescendo of pleasure to which she was being brought by the skilled movement of Alessandro’s touch against her clitoris. She wanted both to move with it and hold that pleasure to her, and at the same time she wanted to escape its dominance, fearing that it would overwhelm her. Her body had become an alien, sweetly tormented instrument that responded only to Alessandro’s command.
Deep down inside herself she could feel an ache of yearning that could only be satisfied by the shared possession of their flesh, by the feel of him deep within her, the feel of her flesh enclosing him and holding him. A surge of
dizzying joy burst through her. At last it was over. Soon she would be the woman she had secretly longed to be for so long—complete, fulfilled, with ownership of the knowledge of her own sexuality and all its secrets given to her by Alessandro in exchange for her unwanted, soon-to-be cast off burden of virginity.
Leonora tensed in the midst of her lyrical pre-celebration, cold truth shadowing her joy. She couldn’t let Alessandro find out that she was still a virgin. It would be the ultimate humiliation. And he would find out if she didn’t stop him soon.
Leonora was pushing him away, retreating from him, struggling to sit up—rejecting him, Alessandro recognised. Swiftly he released her, his pride immediately reacting to her recoil from his touch.
‘You said that...that this wouldn’t happen,’ Leonora reminded him. The ache of her body deprived of his touch was so strong that she could hardly bear it. It set all her nerve-endings jangling against the low dragging weight of her unsatisfied desire.
Alessandro got up and strode over to the chair, picking up the towel they had left there, tossing it over to her, keeping his back towards her whilst Leonora wrapped it clumsily around herself. Leonora’s accusation stung. He had said he wouldn’t touch her—but that had been before. Before what? Before he had seen Falcon looking at her? Before he had walked into the bathroom and felt that surge of arousal that had obliterated everything else?
‘I’m a man,’ he told Leonora with a dismissive shrug, once he had got his emotions and the fierce urgency of his still-aching need for her under control and was able to turn round and look at her. ‘You offered yourself to me, so I responded.’
‘I was frightened because of the spider,’ Leonora defended herself.
The look Alessandro was giving her burned though her fragile defences.
‘It was not in fear that you arched beneath my touch, offering yourself to me in all the ways that a sexually aroused woman offers herself to a man, begging for his touch and his possession. If I wished to do so I could show you all over again just how you responded to me. If I wished to do so. But I do not.’
His words shamed and scorched her. Leonora wanted to deny them, but how could she? She had responded to him. But that had only been because in Alessandro’s arms and beneath his touch her secret fantasy of how her imaginary perfect lover would be had come physically and overpoweringly to life. That was the reason she had responded to Alessandro as passionately as she had, not because she had wanted
Alessandro himself. She could not and must not do that. It was far too risky to let herself want the real man, because then she might— She might what? Fall in love with him and want him for life? Fall in love with Alessandro? How ridiculous—and how very, very fatally dangerous.
He was being ungallant, Alessandro knew, saying things he would normally never have dreamed of saying to a woman, no matter how sexually frustrated he might have felt. But there was something about Leonora that drove him beyond the boundaries of his own rules—something that brought out an emotional passion that infuriated him every bit as much as she did. Neither of those things could be brought within his control, and both of them challenged and taunted him, driving him to want to stamp his possession and his superiority on them, even whilst they remained outside his grasp. Together, Leonora and his passion for her took him to a place he had thought he had conquered a long time ago, a place in which the supposedly cold ashes of his youthful need to prove himself were suddenly glowing dangerously hot.
Was he really so little in control of himself? So little of a man that a woman’s rejection could unleash such a compulsive need to show her that he could make her want him above and beyond all other men? And why this woman?
* * *
Alessandro was in the bathroom, giving Leonora an opportunity to slip on the silky nightdress that had been part of the new wardrobe she had been supplied with, before getting into the enormous bed and lying as close as she could to its edge.
Alessandro had been right to accuse her of wanting him. She had. She still did. But, as shaming as that accusation had been, it was nothing to the shame she would have experienced had she not stopped him and he had discovered the truth. She had heard her brothers joking about ‘ancient’ virgins and the horror of accidentally finding one in one’s bed. Modern men wanted sexual partners who were accomplished lovers—polished, sophisticated women who were informed and entertaining in bed as well as out of it. She, on the other hand, had felt like a raw novice in Alessandro’s arms, giddy with excitement at the thought of the pleasures in store and yet at the same time too overwhelmed by her own excitement to know how to harness it properly.
She had felt like pulling off his shirt and exploring every bit of his torso with her hands as well as smothering it with kisses, when a more knowing woman would probably have aroused him with just one single touch. Alessandro would be a connoisseur of sensuality and all its many pleasures, she suspected, and likely to have nothing but disdain for her inexperienced attempts to show her desire for him.
As he stood under the lash of the shower, waiting for his desire to subside, Alessandro cursed himself. Why had he allowed himself to touch Leonora in the first place? And, having done so, why was he now unable to subdue and dismiss the physical ache for her that was gripping him? She was just a woman, and he never, ever allowed any woman to matter so much to him that he could not stop wanting her—much less have that wanting bringing him to the point he was at now.
It was because she had rejected him, that was all. Because she had rejected him here in his childhood home, where the memories of so many other rejections whipped his spirit and his emotions raw of their usual protection.
Why had she changed her mind? She had wanted him. What was she hoping to gain? Did she imagine that by withholding herself from him she could make him want her more—to the point where she was the one controlling him through his desire for her?
Everything that life had taught him to be in order to protect himself burned into life, fiercely repudiating the thought. He was the only who controlled his own desires. There never had been and there never would be a woman—any woman—who had the power to make him want her against his will, either physically or emotionally. If Leonora wanted to enter into a competition to see which of them had the most control over their sexuality then he was more than prepared to do so—and to win. And he would win. He had to do so. His pride demanded that he did.
Because a small part of him feared that he was not as well defended against her ability to arouse him as he would have liked? Defensive pride held his muscles rigid. He would not and could not tolerate allowing himself to admit that he might want her more than she wanted him. He didn’t. And he would prove that to himself before the weekend was over.
Alessandro reached for the tap and turned it to cold, his body tensing as much under the pressure of his thoughts as against the icy blast that shocked it.
CHAPTER NINE
LEONORA WOKE UP abruptly in the darkness. A dull, heavy ache was pressing down on her womb, a sense of emptiness and unsatisfied need. Somehow or other she must have rolled over in her sleep—and not once but at least a couple of times, given the width of the bed, because now, instead of lying on its edge, she was much further over, towards Alessandro’s side. She knew that because she was lying facing him, and could see the curve of his naked shoulder where the bedclothes had slipped away. If she were to roll over again she could almost lie curled up against his back...
Resolutely she made herself turn away from him and inch her way back to her own side of the bed. Once there she looked at the luminous face of her watch, which she’d left on the beside table. Just gone half past two. The room was still and silent, the only movement coming from the curtain. Leonora’s heart jumped. Was the window open? If it was then the spider would be able to get back in.
Instantly she was imagining it clambering through the window, dropping down onto the floor, and then making its way towards the bed. Beneath the bedclothes her toes twitched, and apprehension slithered down her spine. She wanted to get up and check the window, to put her mind at rest, but she was too afraid to do so. She tried to think of something else, but the only ‘something else’ she could think about was how much she wished that things could have been different earlier on in the evening.
What she meant, of course, was how much she wished that she could have been different. That she could have been the kind of woman who had the confidence to enjoy the sensual pleasure of being in Alessandro’s arms instead of having to remind herself of the reason why she could not allow things to reach their natural conclusion. If she had been then right now she would probably be sleeping safely in his arms, her body replete with the satisfaction of their lovemaking, instead of lying here alone, still aching for him, terrified that the spider might return and miserably aware of how angry she had made him.
She should have brought things to a halt before they had got as far as they had, she admitted, but she had been caught off guard by the intensity of her own response to him. Because she had never allowed herself to be in such a situation before. And because he was, after all, a very, very attractive and sensually powerful man—no woman worthy of the name could fail to be aroused by a man like Alessandro. And she was a woman—very much a woman as far as her newly discovered sensual needs went. Even if she hadn’t realised that before.
How much she wished now that she had lived her life differently and gained the experience that would have made it easy and natural for her to respond fully to Alessandro in the way she had wanted to. How wonderful it would have been in the future to look back on this time and know that she had lived it to the fullest extent. She had started out resenting Alessandro and everything she believed he stood for, her resentment springing originally from his refusal even to consider employing her. But, having learned what she had about him and his childhood, now knowing that they were both middle children, she felt as though there was a special private bond between them—even though Alessandro himself wasn’t aware of it.
A rustle from the curtain jolted her back to her original fear, making her cry out in panic.
Alessandro woke up immediately, automatically sitting up to switch on his bedside light. Its warm glow illuminated the bed, and Leonora’s fear-tensed face.
‘Is the window open, do you think?’ she asked. ‘Only if it is the spider might get back in.’
She had bruised his pride earlier, and would certainly have to be punished for that—but not by his making use of her very real fear, Alessandro decided grimly. He would never allow himself to descend to that level, no matter what other people might choose to do. He might feel angrily sure that a combination of her competitive nature and the fact that he had refused to employ her had led to her seizing the opportunity he had accidentally given her to prove that she could best him, but that did not mean he could now allow himself to use her fear against her.
Alessandro had witnessed his father using those kind of underhand tactics too often to want to use them himself. Besides, a victory based on another person’s weakness rather than his own strength was no victory at all to Alessandro. No, when she admitted in his arms that she wanted him so much that nothing else mattered it would be because she did want to be in his arms, not because fear had driven here there for protection. His father would have called him a fool, no doubt, deriding him as he had done so often when he had been growing up, but his father’s opinion of him no longer mattered. He had grown beyond that, and it was now his own moral estimation of himself that was the yardstick by which he measured himself as a man.
Which was why he was putting aside his earlier anger to offer calmly, ‘Would you like me to check the window?’
‘Would you?’ Hope and disbelief mingled in her voice in equal measure. It was an unfamiliar and very fragile feeling to know that a man—especially a man like Alessandro—was willing to do something brave on her behalf. But then during the short time they had spent together she had already experienced more than one unfamiliar feeling with regard to Alessandro.
He was being very generous, given what had happened earlier, and through her fear Leonora felt a renewed stab of guilt for the way she had behaved. She felt so confused and unsure of herself, all too conscious that somehow she had allowed herself to stray into territory she didn’t know and where she felt very vulnerable.