by Lynne Graham
‘Threat?’
‘Take my five years of abstinence and your virginity and…we’ll work it out,’ he promised thickly, his hands cupping her hips to bring her into firmer contact with his throbbing sex. ‘But I can’t promise it won’t hurt…a little.’
‘Hmm…’ Kerry mumbled, only to gasp out loud as he rolled her back from him to explore the straining peaks of her breasts.
Every nerve-ending already primed with anticipation, her body was still supersensitised to his touch. She lay back, wanton with longing, shivers of desire rippling through her, the dulled, tightening ache between her thighs making it impossible for her to stay still. When he burned a passionate trail down over her unbearably tender flesh, a driven little moan parted her lips. Every feeling was intensified. The warm, clean male scent of him flared her nostrils, so familiar even after so long that her very senses rejoiced in him.
Her hands found the corded smoothness of his shoulders and then clutched into his thick hair, her hunger climbing with shameless greed and impatience. She wanted, needed…and he knew what she needed. He traced the moist, swollen heart of her and with intoxicating expertise roused her to a fever pitch of desire. She cried out in sensual shock, for the pleasure was mindless and unrelenting, and before very long the surge of her own hunger was more than she could bear.
‘Oh…please…’ she begged, hardly knowing what she was saying, her hips writhing, her whole being pitched on a tormenting edge.
‘Want me?’ His lean, strong face rigid with the control he was exerting over his own impatience, Luciano gazed down at the hauntingly lovely face that had somehow continually, infuriatingly superimposed itself over every other feminine image he had tried to rouse an interest in. Having her just once would end that, set him free.
‘So…much,’ she admitted.
Hot, hungry golden eyes locked to her with laser-force intensity. He came over her, spread her slender thighs with precision, took a deep, shuddering breath and plunged into the slick, wet heat of her. An agonised groan of pleasure was wrenched from him.
The sharp stab of pain made Kerry jerk and grit her teeth together. But the wonder of that intimacy, the sensation of him filling her, the wild surge of her own hunger for his driving maleness overwhelmed that discomfort. Instinct made her arch up to him and it was his undoing. What control he had wrested from him by that minor encouragement, he sank into her harder and faster and set a raw pagan rhythm to satisfy his own overriding need. White-hot excitement gripped her. Her heart hammered, her breath emerged in quick, shallow gasps. He drove her to a mindless peak where her body crested and splintered in a dazzling, electrifying charge of fulfilment. As she cried out in ecstasy, his own climax took him in a savage, shattering wave. His powerful body shuddered violently as he poured himself into her.
His first conscious thought was that she had to be the only woman in the world worth waiting five years for. He buried his face in the silky disarray of her hair and drank in the warm intrinsic scent of her and closed both arms round her tight. As she continued to tremble from the effects of her own release, he recognised that he had been very lucky. He had almost blown it but someone somewhere had decided to be merciful and make her wonderfully responsive.
‘I never dreamt…it would be like that,’ Kerry whispered shakily.
Luciano lifted hands that he noted to his dismay were unsteady and curved them to her flushed cheekbones. He encountered wondering blue eyes. ‘It’ll be better the next time, cara mia.’
While it dawned on him that in his original scheme of things there was not to be a next time and he endeavoured to explain his own mental shift in gear, his attention was stolen by the sight of the contraceptives still lying on the chest by the bed. The packet seemed to glint in smug reproach at him. He hadn’t used anything to protect her. Startled by that realisation, he tensed.
Kerry wrapped her arms round him and gave a blissful sigh, and he basked in her naive appreciation and shrugged off his concern. Just this one time, this one special time, he had been careless but he wouldn’t be again, he told himself. He rolled over, carrying her with him, and draped her over him with care to hold her close.
‘I feel sleepy,’ she whispered, her face buried in his shoulder, utter contentment embracing her because she knew that she loved him and nothing could have convinced her at that moment that taking a leap of faith had been wrong.
‘No rest for the wicked.’ Luciano hauled her up to him again to ravish her reddened mouth with renewed hunger. It was just sex, he reminded himself, nothing he had to make rigid rules about.
In the night he woke up, shaking and perspiring from the dreams that still taunted him with the knowledge of how unsafe life could be. As usual, he had believed he was back in his cell, angry and disturbed voices crying out in the night, inmates banging on the steel doors, while he fought the sensation of being trapped and helpless in a nightmare that never quit. But then the peaceful silence of the room enclosed him. He focused on the dying glow of the fire and the woman sleeping beside him and the agonising tension in his muscles eased.
He tugged Kerry closer, and as she gave a drowsy murmur he kissed her awake. ‘I need you,’ he breathed roughly. He despised himself for admitting that but not enough to deny his sudden, overpowering craving to remind himself all over again that he was free and able to lose himself in one of life’s most primal and basic pleasures.
Even though she was exhausted, Kerry woke up early, for rising ahead of her grandparents was her usual routine. Luciano had one heavy arm as well as a hair-roughened thigh draped possessively over her. She was uncomfortable but tender appreciation softened her eyes as she looked at him. At last he was asleep. She smiled, for she ached in places she had not known a woman could ache: he was a wildly insatiable lover. She was still stunned by the effect of all that pleasure and astonished by the extent of her own abandonment. But she felt no regret, no, not an ounce of regret, for she had been reassured by the undeniable depth of his need for her.
She lay surveying him: the blue-shadowed roughness of his stubborn jawline, the outrageous length of his black lashes that were the only femininising influence in that lean, strong-boned face of his and the bronzed vibrance of his skin tone against the white linen. He was, without a single doubt, absolutely gorgeous. He could also, without a single doubt, have broken that five-year abstinence with some very much more beautiful, sophisticated and experienced woman than she was. But instead he had come back to her. That had to mean something. If she still had feelings for him, why shouldn’t he still have feelings for her? She had to rise above her own negative habit of thinking too little of herself, she thought fiercely.
Easing inch by careful inch out from beneath Luciano’s hold, Kerry crept out of bed. She would make him breakfast. She just had this overpowering need to spoil him. Making do with the very basic bathroom facilities on the ground floor, she then trawled through her sparse and dated wardrobe to find something more presentable to wear than her usual jeans. It was too cold for a dress but the soft blue cotton shift she put on flattered her and she tugged on a cardigan with it.
Luciano wakened in a state of relaxation new to him. He looked for her. She wasn’t there. It annoyed him that he should be annoyed that she wasn’t there. He hoped she wasn’t making him breakfast because he knew he would end up trying to eat it even if it was inedible. His active mind soon switched to planning the future, for the previous night had supplied a very satisfactory framework. To a certain extent, he had misjudged her, he acknowledged grudgingly. Kerry had neither played a part in framing him for the crime for which he had been falsely imprisoned, nor played fast and loose with the money he had given her grandfather. When he still wanted her, why shouldn’t he keep her in his life? Why the hell should he make a big deal of that?
It would be on his terms: he would spend the occasional weekend at Ballybawn. The hire of a helicopter and a pilot would be essential. As for the castle, he would concentrate on the original and oldest part of
the building. Once repairs had been done and he had put in a power shower, a jacuzzi and under-floor heating, it would be an unusual pied-à-terre but perfectly acceptable. Of course, he would have to be frank and tell her that marriage wasn’t on the cards this time. Whatever, she would not lose by the arrangement. He would turf her friend, the artist with the Egyptian fixation, out of the Georgian wing and have it renovated for her grandparents’ occupation. He would also make Kerry his estate manager. He pictured her waiting here for him on Friday evenings…smiling at the door or in the jacuzzi.
Humming under her breath, dogs at her heels, Kerry balanced the tray on her hip and opened the bedroom door. ‘I bet you’re hungry,’ she said chirpily.
‘Funnily enough…’ As Luciano absorbed her hopeful, brimming smile, he hesitated on the instant negative he was about to utter.
She set a tray on his lap. He stared down at the picture-perfect cooked breakfast in astonishment, for he was convinced that nothing that looked that good could taste bad. ‘This is fantastic…’
‘A few years back, I did a couple of catering courses,’ Kerry confessed with wry amusement. ‘At one time I thought of opening a small restaurant here but in the end I appreciated that there wasn’t the demand for it.’
‘Restaurants are a very high-risk venture,’ Luciano murmured approvingly, adding a kitchen to his refurbishment plans as he ate. ‘We have to talk.’
Meeting his level dark golden gaze and remembering the night hours that had passed along with the incredible passion, Kerry was consumed by an attack of shyness. ‘What about?’
‘Us…where we go from here.’
Although she thought it much too soon for any such discussion, Kerry said nothing, for she suspected that Luciano was quite incapable of just letting their relationship drift. He had always liked everything organised, controlled and structured.
Lounging back against the banked-up pillows, Luciano studied her with a quality of cool gravity that made her tense. ‘I’ve got to be honest…I’m not going to marry you—’
‘For goodness’ sake…’ Her fingers clenched convulsively into the over-long sleeves of her cardigan which she had been unconsciously fiddling with and her face flamed. ‘Give me some credit. I’m not expecting you to be thinking about marriage right this minute—’
‘But that’s not what I’m telling you. I’m saying that I’m never going to think of marriage,’ Luciano delivered steadily. ‘I find you very attractive and at this moment in time I still want you in my life, but we can’t go back to where we once were. That’s gone.’
A deep inner quiver had convulsed Kerry’s insides. She could feel the colour and the warmth draining from her, for when he had said ‘never’ in that cool tone of emphasis it sent a chill down her spine. When he felt the need to impose rigid boundaries within hours of their new intimacy, it degraded what she had believed they had shared to the lowest possible physical level.
‘Agreed that the past is way back and we’re both bound to have changed…’ Valiantly, Kerry swallowed hard on the thickness in her throat. Broken things could be fixed and the past could be reclaimed. Didn’t he know that? ‘But I don’t see why we have to talk about this now—’
‘I don’t want any misunderstandings. Come here…’ He stretched out a lean, imperious hand and she was so tense she had to force herself forward. As her fingers were engulfed in his, he tugged her down beside him and anchored one arm round her slight, taut shoulders. ‘That’s better. I have plans for Ballybawn.’
‘Oh…?’ She loved him, Kerry reminded herself bracingly, and it was very early days. Naturally, he wasn’t about to plunge right back into where they had been five years earlier but he might have done her the justice of appreciating that that had not been her expectation either. Instead, whether he realised it or not, he had made it sound as though her sole ambition was to marry him.
‘I shall renovate it—’
‘Restore…the word’s restore,’ Kerry corrected, trying to still the little shake in her voice, for she was conceding that she needed to be honest with herself too and admit that she naturally did still want to marry him. She wondered if in some ghastly immature way she had already made the mistake of letting him see just how much he still meant to her. Was that what had inspired his wounding determination to tell her that everything was over before they had even really begun? For wasn’t that what he was telling her? That their present relationship was a temporary thing that could go no place at all?
There was nothing worthy of restoration in Luciano’s opinion but, having breezed past what he had regarded as the most sensitive point without a word of protest from her, he had relaxed. ‘I’ll make you my estate manager,’ he informed her. ‘You can bring your grandparents back from Dublin and they can live in the Georgian wing—’
‘But my friend, Elphie, is using—’
‘I’ll make it well worth her while to move out. A few coats of paint and we’ll never know she was there in the first place. Once I’ve had a few improvements made, Hunt and Viola will be very comfortable there.’
‘That’s a very generous offer.’ But Kerry was too agitated to stay seated any longer and she got up to pace away a couple of steps before turning back to look at him. ‘We’d be your tenants, then.’
Pure mockery fired Luciano’s golden gaze. ‘I don’t think I’ll be regarding you in quite that light. You won’t be living in the Georgian wing with your grandparents—except of course when I’m not here. But when I am here I’ll want you with me in the main part of the castle, which I will restore for our benefit.’
In a daze of uncertainty, Kerry stared at him, her heart beating so fast it felt as if it was at the foot of her throat. ‘Are you talking about us…er…living together?’
‘No, I’m talking about me flying back here to spend weekends with you…obviously I couldn’t make it every weekend, though.’ Luciano’s besetting sin of needing to dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t’ had kicked in.
‘I…I see.’ And Kerry did see, she truly did see, and what she saw made her very much regret spoiling him with breakfast in bed. She would be his mistress, perhaps not even as much: a casual lover for whenever he felt like a country weekend with sex included. She wondered why it had not dawned on him that her grandfather might feel it rather inappropriate to live off the equivalent of what he would see as his granddaughter’s wages of sin. How could he think that she would even consider such a demeaning arrangement? How could he have got her so wrong? And what was she planning to do about it?
Her attention fell on the door into the bathroom and lingered while she wondered if he had yet to sample the facilities. ‘Let me run you a bath—’
‘Forget it…the plumbing is shot. Last night, I used the shower in the holiday cottage—’
‘There’s nothing wrong with the plumbing. In fact you were depriving yourself of a very special bathing experience.’ Kerry let the bathroom door half close behind her and switched on the bath taps, calling, ‘You just need to run the water a while.’
When Luciano finally took the bait and pushed open the door to see what she was doing, she was waiting to dart behind him and stretch up on tiptoe to cover his eyes with her spread hands. ‘Close your eyes,’ she urged in a playful tone.
‘Kerry…what the—?’
‘You’re not allowed to look,’ she murmured sweetly.
His imagination racing straight to an erotic interpretation of that declaration, Luciano smiled and allowed her to turn him round and back him until his thighs brushed the edge of the bath. Without hesitation, Kerry then planted her palms on his muscular chest and thrust with all her might to off-balance him.
Taken entirely by surprise, Luciano could find nothing to grip to regain his balance and he went backwards into the copper tub with a gigantic splash. As he vented a savage expletive at the sheer shock of the freezing cold water and his eyes shot open in disbelief, he found Kerry staring down at him with a look of scornful satisfaction in her gaze.
>
‘Another Ballybawn invention, Luciano. The water is pumped up from the lake. My great-grandfather firmly believed that his longevity derived from his daily refreshing dip in lake water. Unfortunately since then the pipes have silted up a little but, to be frank, you deserve to bath with pond-scum!’
‘Santo cielo!’ Luciano heaved himself up out of the slimy green water with a shudder for if there was one thing he could not bear it was to be less than clean. ‘If you think this is funny—’
‘It wasn’t meant to be.’ There was fierce condemnation in Kerry’s eyes. ‘It was my answer to the kind of relationship that you just had the cheek to offer me! How could you try to use my attachment to my grandparents and what used to be their home as a means of persuasion? You’re wasting your time because I won’t ever sink so low that I become some woman you sleep with when you feel like it—’
‘That was not what I suggested!’ Luciano launched back at her in a blistering rage as he snatched at a towel to wind it round his magnificent bronzed length. ‘Whether I like it or not, your grandparents are involved in what happens between us and the onus is on me to make some provision for them—’
‘Having evicted them, your sudden concern for them comes rather late in the day!’
‘Don’t let your pride come between you and your common sense.’ Brilliant golden eyes hard, Luciano made that warning with icy clarity. ‘You won’t get a better offer than the one I’ve just put on the table.’
‘But I’m not up for grabs or offers,’ Kerry proclaimed with furious distaste. ‘Last night was a mutual mistake. So, you decide what you want to do with Ballybawn and leave me out of it. Right now, I just work here!’
‘Is that a fact? If you just worked here by now I would’ve sacked you for screaming at me like a shrew, so don’t attempt to hide behind that cop-out!’
‘Oh, so you would have sacked me…you never could stand the smallest criticism,’ Kerry could not resist asserting, watching him go rigid at that less than tactful reminder. ‘But you’re great with the threats. Only you’re wasting your time threatening me because I’ve already lived through the worst you can do—’