"Be my guest." He opened the door and flicked on the light, then closed it politely behind her, saying, "Be sure to let Frankie know that you won't be available this evening. You're going to be in a meeting with me."
Ally wanted to argue with him about his high handedness, but Frank had already picked up and she was thrown off balance by his demand, curious enough about it to tell her right hand man exactly what he'd wanted her to. When she came out, something luscious smelling assailed her nose. It smelled a lot like her mother's spaghetti sauce recipe and launched her back to childhood, when her mother would spend all day with a pot of it simmering on the back burner for dinner that evening, although everyone agreed it was always better the next day. It was pretty stupendous the first day, too.
She noticed that he had set two napkins, silverware and wine glasses at the snack bar on the other side of the huge kitchen island, in front of two beautiful mahogany counter height chairs. He dished out what he probably considered to be a moderate amount of pasta, then applied a generous ladle of gravy that was full of what she knew would be both sweet and hot Italian sausages, pepperoni, and hamburger, along with tons of onion, garlic and peppers.
A basket of garlic bread appeared as if by magic, fresh shaved Parmesan cheese, as well as a bowl of baby carrots cooked with garlic and ginger that he knew were her favorites.
"Wow, thank you for putting all of this together." Ally wasn't at all sure she could eat anything, but it all looked scrumptious.
She watched him surreptitiously as he moved about the kitchen with complete confidence, just like he moved through the rest of his life. He didn't look like the typical Italian man—in fact, he was pretty much the complete opposite, with a relatively fair complexion that she remembered tanned beautifully in the summer and bright, piercing blue eyes. He was tall and bulkily muscular, although not muscle bound, with broad shoulders and a slim waist, and a butt to die for. She knew—and blushed at the remembrance—that he had very little body hair, especially in comparison to the rest of the men she knew, and only a sprinkling of darker blond hair on his chest.
"Is something wrong?" he asked, holding both plates in the air as if he expected she was going to tell him she had become allergic to spaghetti, as most of the few women he'd dated lately seemed to be because it was high in carbs.
"No, sorry. When I get tired, I stare…" her voice trailed off, "inappropriately." It was barely a whisper, but she knew he'd caught it.
He put the plates down, saying, "Have a seat. Eat, eat. You're too thin, by far."
Her doctor wouldn't have agreed with him, but Ally knew that Enzo wouldn't care in the least what the medical community thought she should weigh.
Ally stared at the chair he was pulling back for her as if it was going to bite her—and it probably was. "Uh, no, thank you. I prefer to stand."
She wanted to try to slap him again—maybe this time she'd catch him off guard and actually succeed—for his knowing grin, but he disappeared too quickly for her to do that, returning with a big decorative pillow that he applied to the unforgiving hardwood seat, then offered her his hand to guide her to the seat.
How could she refuse such a gallant offer, despite the fact that she knew she ought to? She put her hand in his and let him seat her. Surprisingly, as soon as she sat down and her backside objected a lot less than she had anticipated that it would, she found her appetite and ate everything he'd given her, even the generous bowl of baby carrots, which she hadn't had in years.
Finally sated, she leaned back in her chair and sighed, crumpling the fine white linen napkin onto the counter. "My word, I haven't had a meal like that in ages. I ate way too much!"
"Nah. Like I said, you need some meat on your bones if you're going to take me on."
The blush was back, of course. It always surfaced at the most inconvenient of times—like when her dirty little mind turned everything into a double entendre. "You do Mom proud, Enzo."
It was his turn to blush, to her amazement. She didn't think she could recall a time she'd ever seen him do that.
"Thank you," he said, catching her eye. "That means a lot to me. Your mom was as close to a mother as I could ever hope to get in this world. She was a special lady."
Her eyes filling with tears that she didn't want him to see, Ally reached for her wine glass, which was nearly empty. "That, she was."
He refilled hers and his, then raised his towards her. "To your mom. I'm sure she's got Heaven shipshape several times over by now."
No matter how hard she fought against it, two tears escaped down her cheeks, even though he'd made her laugh. "Heck yes, and now she's down with Daddy, running him and the Devil ragged."
When Enzo saw her tears, he set his own glass down, took hers away, and reached out to cup her cheek, wiping away a tear with the side of his thumb. "Ah, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to make you cry."
His voice was so soft that, to her horror, she began to cry even harder. It seemed the more she tried to stop it, the worse it got, until he enveloped her in his arms and cradled her against him. He didn't try to cop a feel; he didn't try to kiss her. He just held her and rocked the slightest bit back and forth. "You were very lucky to have two such wonderful parents."
"I know. I'm sorry you didn't." She knew she should have been pulling away from him, out of his much too close embrace, but it was just too damned wonderful to be held like this, in strong, sure arms—in his strong, sure arms! She was liking it much too much, and Ally was wary of getting used to it. What had happened between them in the past few hours, was an aberration, and she couldn't afford to rekindle the crush she'd barely succeeded in tamping down the first time. That was rapidly becoming impossible to do within the confines of his embrace.
"Oh, but I did. Your dad practically adopted me without knowing me from Adam, really, and you all took me in and treated me like a part of the family, even though I didn't appreciate what you were offering like I should have, at the time. You were very generous to share your parents with me—the interloper—like you did."
"Well." Ally smiled unrepentantly. "As long as I continued to get everything I ever wanted, why not?"
Enzo laughed and squeezed her a bit harder, one hand roaming down to cup her bottom. "I know. You were terribly spoiled—cars, and horses and more horses. As I said before, your father should have been putting you over his knee at least once a week, as far as I could tell, and considering what a tight ship he ran, I'm surprised he let you get away with everything you did."
Chapter 3
Ally tried to pull away from him, experimentally, and found she simply couldn't unless he allowed it. "I didn't get away with that much!"
"Like hell! You should have been paddled every night for a week and had your car taken away from you for six months for driving home from Cassie Beauchamp's sweet sixteen party drunk—and high."
She'd been taking a sip of her wine and nearly choked on it at that last bit. Her parents hadn't noticed either the smell or her bloodshot eyes from the pot she and everyone else at the party had been smoking. They were more concerned with the alcohol on her breath and the fact that she parked on the lawn rather than in the driveway and bobbed and weaved her way to the house.
Leave it to Enzo not to have missed a trick, although she couldn't even remember seeing him there at the time.
"Did they give you any consequences for that at all?" Enzo asked incredulously.
"They took away my keys for a week," she crowed almost proudly, then added sotto voce, "But I got them back in three days because I had to work."
One expressive eyebrow rose. "Case in point. Then there was the shoplifting incident."
"I didn't shoplift!" she informed him heatedly, feeling almost like she was fifteen or so and trying to convince her parents of her innocence. "It was Mary Southgate and Theresa Palumbo! They took cigarettes. I didn't steal so much as a bottle of nail polish."
"They were both bad influences, and if I recall correctly, all of this happened while you we
re out past your curfew," he supplied smoothly.
She was always out past her curfew, because the bastard was right; her parents never enforced any of the rules they set down for her, and she knew it. But Ally was amazed that he remembered so much detail about her, and she said as much.
He blushed again, as if he'd been caught with his hand in the cookie jar, himself, saying, "You were all your father could talk about most of the time. It's a wonder he ever got any business done." That was true, but she had always been a point of interest to him. She was such an untouchable, unfathomable entity—having grown up on the right side of the tracks—that, at first, he'd been surprised to find that he actually liked her. She was indulged to the extreme, but somehow had missed becoming a nasty person because of it, and she was an inveterate animal lover, especially her damned horses. Despite the grief she caused her parents occasionally, although none of her antics were hurtful or violent, she obviously loved her parents and that earned her a lot of points in his book, spoiled or not.
Besides, although he knew better than most that she was out of his league and distinctly off limits, he basked in the adoration for him that he could see she was doing her best to hide from him—and everyone else—and failing completely. But he'd never teased her about it or rubbed her nose in it. Until she grew up and came back from college, he'd felt more like a protective older brother to her than a potential suitor.
And by the time she'd come home with her degree, he was in the middle of the schism with her father when he left to begin his own operation, and he didn't see much of her.
Although he did still keep as close tabs on her as he could, especially when he finally got a good look at how she'd grown up from across the room of a chamber of commerce event that they had both attended. She looked amazing, and he had immediately become more thoroughly jealous of every man who approached her than he had a right to be. Not that that stopped him.
But he didn't act on his feelings. She was making her own move to take over her father's concerns, and, if she succeeded—and that looked quite likely—they would become rivals.
So as much as he didn't want to, he'd distanced himself from her, reduced to gazing longingly at her when he got the very occasional opportunity, and then only when he knew no one was looking, of course.
"Oh," Ally replied, somewhat deflated. She'd thought, in a brief moment of weakness, that he might confess that he'd had a crush on her, too, but that was entirely too much to hope for.
He could see that she was let down and couldn't bear to see that look on her face. So, he caught her eye and then rather boldly bent down to kiss her, taking her lips as if he had every right, as if it was something he had come to expect, something he did every day because it was his right.
Ally knew she should have been protesting—loudly—but was surprised to realize that the impulse just wasn't there. What was there was the sharp need to kiss him back, to try to assuage the insistent throb between her legs. She wanted nothing more at that moment than to press her body against his, to feel his plains and angles against her softness. Her nipples blossomed as he deepened the kiss, his tongue delving past her lips, the fingers of one big hand in her hair and a thick arm around her waist, lifting her even closer to him, pressing her against the unmistakable evidence of his desire for her.
That hard length pressing into her tummy was like a jolt that made a beeline for that hidden area between her legs that had been weeping for him since she'd laid eyes on him, making her wetter than she had already gotten from that horrible spanking he'd dealt her. She didn't know why, because they certainly hurt like a mother while they were happening, but in the aftermath of the occasional spankings she'd been given by eager—if novice-boyfriends—they had her practically ripping their clothes off so that she could mount them where they sat.
Of course, she knew she couldn't do that to him and, besides, the spankings she'd had before didn't compare to what he'd just done to her. The previous ones were given by men who just wanted to get into her pants, not by someone who was so obviously quite expert at it. The thought of how he might have acquired all of that experience didn't set well with her at all, so she pushed it to the back of her mind.
That spanking of his was the worst she'd ever received, leaving her so sore she didn't want to move a muscle, and so horny she had to clench her fists against the impulse to grab his hand and place it on her crotch. She'd very nearly thrown herself at him in the back of his limo. Only the surprising depth of her exhaustion had saved her from that ignominious end.
Not long into the kiss, Ally gave up all pretense of trying to remain unmoved and neutral. She just couldn't do it—her body wouldn't let her. It was most definitely in league with him, innately recognizing and responding to his very natural dominance.
But just as she was beginning to kiss him back, he took a step away from her and took her hand, leading her to a little alcove off the living room that faced the lake, which was dimly lit by the occasional scattered camp along its shores.
"It's off season," he whispered. "Those are security lights, not house lights. And the marina's too far away. No one can see us."
It was a gorgeous, almost secret place with a floor to ceiling bow window where every other square of what should have been glass was actually a mirror, so when his hand reached up to begin to march down the line of tiny pearl buttons on her blouse, she could watch him do it. The image of those strong brown fingers manipulating those delicate nibs had her thinking of what they would look like if it wasn't buttons he was playing with, and she found herself so entranced by both the images in the mirrors and the ones in her head that blended so well with them that she couldn't look away.
She was so far gone that she barely noticed that her blouse was hanging completely open until she felt cool air on breasts he'd just released from captivity, then surprisingly gentle, callused fingertips on her collarbone.
His eyes were on her, watching his own hands as they explored the creamy skin he'd uncovered. "You were always so beautiful, Ally," he whispered absently, almost as if she wasn't there.
She could feel herself suffuse with the heat of a tremendous blush, and knowing the truth of it as she stood here in front of the one man in the world she wanted most but couldn't have, she was even harder on herself than usual. She had no delusions about her own looks. She wasn't a troll, but she was no Angelina Jolie, either. She was, at best, pleasant looking, with her naturally curly chestnut hair being her best feature. She took after her Irish mother in complexion, her skin a delicate pale that required vats of sunscreen in the summer if she was going to be out in the sun. Her eyes were green, but her brows and lashes leaned towards sandy, so she had both tinted. But that was about as far as she was willing to go in regard to changing herself. She flatly refused to have the plastic surgery that would have straightened the nose that had been broken when she failed to catch a football the neighbor boy had thrown to her during her tomboy phase. There would be no Botox or collagen or chin implants—something she had been very surprised to hear that her male counterparts were all doing for themselves. Her makeup was conservative and businesslike, just like her taste in clothes.
Boring.
But then, she wasn't a model, and her chosen profession could be quite chauvinistic, still, in many ways. She had found that it was best if she was always professional and above board, completely business like, so that no one got any ideas that she was after anything else. And she thought her slightly off kilter nose gave her a badge of honor, of sorts, that many of the other bosses had, although no doubt they had earned theirs in an entirely different way than she had.
Enzo—her greatest rival—had somehow managed, by the deceptively simple act of spanking her, to cause all of the feelings she had so carefully tucked away to bubble to the surface, and now he was all she could think about, especially with his fingers touching her with such reverence and yet avoiding all of the spots that cried out for his attention.
They roamed her shoulders
and down the outsides of her arms, tickled the middle of her palms, then glided upwards, along the ultra-sensitive insides of her arms and across the very top of her back, feathering along her neck and landing, somehow, on her lips just before he claimed them again, crushing her against him and holding her there, her spiked nipples buried in, then rubbed tantalizingly against the expensive silk of his shirt as the ache surged powerfully in each of them and their hunger pushed them past the point of reservation.
He took an incongruous step back from her and Ally nearly fell over as she felt the keen loss of his lips and the gorgeous lines of his body against hers. She was naked to the waist, and he held her eyes with his as he reached out to tuck his fingers into the waistband of her skirt, turning it expertly around to the back so that he could dispense with its button and zipper.
He already knew what was beneath them, and for a long moment, he indulged himself, looking at her but also at her reflection in the window, remembering how often he had thought about having her in exactly this position, only to ruthlessly dismiss the image from his mind. She wasn't for the likes of him.
Yet here she was, pink tipped breasts rising with each ragged breath, curls falling almost but not quite onto slender shoulders, a bottom lip that was swollen from his own attentions, still slightly moist from his tongue.
The only physical secrets she still had from him were covered by his least favorite kind of women's underwear, which he dispensed with in seconds, pulling the waistband out and ripping the material away from her body with his bare hands.
She was exquisitely nude, but obviously self-conscious about it, her creamy skin suffusing a delicious shade of pink all over. He refused to resist the impulse to walk around behind her, gently patting a bottom that still looked atrociously sore, and she confirmed that thought by trying to arch away from his hand.
Transgressions Page 3