As if the day hadn’t thrown out enough lousy twists at her, it decided now to throw out an image of her sinking into him like a sex-starved wanton.
She turned away, despising herself for being such an easy, willing kill. Had he lost any of his dignity? Not this man. But she’d lost everything: grace, dignity, self-respect.
The lift doors had closed. She hadn’t noticed. With an impatient finger she stabbed the button to call up another one. Tears stung her eyes and clogged her throat.
He arrived back at her side, and he’d switched to speaking English. She realised that he was speaking to Cindy, telling her what was about to happen in precise and cool boss-like language, then he was holding the phone out to her.
‘She requires your confirmation that Nicky can leave here with Fredo.’
The word Nicky slid strangely off his tongue; it was kind of foreign to him yet intimate. Her stomach muscles knotted while at the same time her voice remained level and calm as she gave the permission Cindy required. A new lift arrived and they entered it as Cindy was trying to get Freya to answer yet more questions about what was going on.
Enrico took the phone back from her. ‘You are now OK with this?’ he enquired.
Only an idiot would try and ask him the same questions Cindy had been asking Freya. The call ended abruptly and, just like that, her son was being handed over to a stranger.
Power always at his elegant fingertips, she thought bitterly as the lift took them downwards. Her life had been taken over. Her son’s life had been taken over. Hannard’s and its entire workforce had been taken over.
She wished she could see even a tiny bit of difference between the three, but she couldn’t. He was invincible, intractable…
More rotten adjectives.
She heaved out a sigh. The lift stopped. It took her a few seconds to realise that the doors were not opening, but it was only when she glanced at Enrico that she realised that he’d done it.
He’d stopped the lift between floors and was in the process of bending to place her box of things on the floor. He straightened up, and the stern cut of his expression was granite-like when he fixed his eyes on her.
‘What?’ she asked warily.
‘You,’ he answered.
‘M-me?’
He closed the gap between them and Freya felt the sudden urge to start clawing at walls again to get away. She backed, one set of tense fingers making contact with cold metal, the other set clinging to his business case as if for dear life.
‘This, then,’ he said and lowered his mouth onto hers.
She should not have let it happen but it did. She hated him, so why did she let him kiss her like this? And he did kiss her, long and slow and so deep her head was swimming even before he leant his hips into hers. She felt the ridge of his arousal and her breathing feathered. His hand came to stroke the hand she had flattened to the lift wall.
It was such a sensuously tantalising gesture that deliberately mimicked an earlier one. He was playing games—sex games—using one of those Enrico Ranieri seduction techniques that could fell a woman without her really understanding how. Then he was moving against her rhythmically with that stroking hand. Luxurious desire just drowned her, heat pooling where he moved against her sending her legs weak.
Another demonstration of his power, she thought hazily. But it just wasn’t fair that he could make her feel like this. It wasn’t fair that every single inch of her was languorous and thick with need.
When Enrico drew away she couldn’t move a muscle. If the lift wall hadn’t been there she’d have fallen down. Her eyes were closed and her mouth was still parted, lips full and moist and pulsing—wanting more.
Bella, he thought. Irresistible. He did not know whether to be pleased by the evidence of how responsive she was to him, or be more convinced that she could not control herself around any man.
He hit the lift button to set it moving, then with grim silent precision tugged the elastic bands from her hair. The surprise sting to her scalp brought her eyes flickering open at the same moment as her hair tumbled down.
Eyes like dark green oceans stared up at him. ‘There,’ he said coolly. ‘Now you look like the woman of Enrico Ranieri, all tousled and love-drugged and eager for me.’
It was the same as the slap of a hand across her cheek. In fact he could not have come up with a better way to pay her back for her earlier slapping of him. He could not have rendered her less able to react because her insides were still churning with pleasure, even if her brain was now functioning again.
He bent to pick up the box as the lift stopped again. Glancing down, Freya was stunned to discover that her fingers still curled around the handle of his business case.
Trained, she thought bleakly. Trained in so many ways three years ago to meet this man’s needs that she’d stepped right back into her old role without knowing she was doing it.
The lift doors slid open on the ground-floor foyer. It was no longer lunch-time or a break-time, so the expanse of white marble was not as busy as it had been the last time she’d been here.
Still, there were enough people there to witness her exit from the building with Enrico’s arm resting possessively along her slender back and his hand intimately curving the indentation of her waist.
Thoroughly kissed, dishevelled and now supported by a man who could not have made a better job of creating the impression he desired.
Freya kept her head down and refused to look at anyone. ‘I…’
‘Hate me, I know,’ he finished for her. ‘But say thanks to the fates for allowing you to wear those unflattering flat shoes today. If you had been wearing stilettos I would be carrying you out of here, you are so weak with desire for this man you hate.’
A black Mercedes saloon was parked at the kerb-side. Enrico opened the rear door for her to precede him inside. Like a fully trained fool she went, moving across the seat so that he could get in beside her, simply assuming that they were to wait in the car until Fredo arrived with her son.
However, the car moved off almost as soon as Enrico had closed the door.
‘But—w-what about Nicky…?’
‘He will travel with Fredo,’ Enrico answered.
‘But you can’t do that!’ Freya straightened jerkily on the seat. ‘How dare you do that?’
She was already twisting around to stare out of the rear window to look for the reassuring sight of another car keeping pace with them.
There wasn’t one—not one of Enrico’s kind, anyway.
It came to her then, the full, battering force of what was actually going on!
‘You’ve stolen my son.’ She turned hot, accusing eyes on Enrico. ‘You’ve stolen him!’
He frowned. ‘Don’t be—’
‘Stop the car,’ she shook out, making a lurching dive for the passenger door, panic erupting like a spewing volcano as her hand closed over the lock. ‘Stop this car so I can get out!’
On a thick curse Enrico was forced to stretch his long body out across the gap between them so he could clamp his hand over her hand to stop her from doing something crazy like diving out of a moving car.
‘I have not stolen him!’ he rasped out. ‘Why would I want to steal my own son?’
‘Where is he, then?’ She fought him like crazy and she was shaking all over, body, voice. ‘W-what have you done with him? How could you do this? How could you separate him from me? How can you be so utterly, totally thick and stupid as to—?’
‘He is travelling by special taxi with Fredo because this car is not equipped with a child safety seat yet!’ Enrico ground out, grimly restraining her by her wrists while she continued to fight him to get free.
‘Then I should be travelling with him, not with you!’
Her eyes flashed, her hair crackled and her body heaved and twisted against him. His breath hissed from his body as his frustration erupted.
‘Stop this, Freya,’ he muttered. ‘You are hysterical.’ It just had not occurred to him that s
he would react like this to something that, to him, was merely a practicality! ‘You know that Fredo will take good care of him!’
‘That’s not your decision to make!’
‘It is now, cara, so get used to it.’
Angrily he threw her wrists aside and sat back in the seat, leaving her to sit alone now that the first mad rush of adrenalin was fading away—though the vibrations of terror still raced through her. This latest demonstration of his power over her showed that she was already losing control of Nicky to him.
Stress sizzled up her backbone, the afternoon of shocks and scares and battles culminating in a sudden and blinding tension headache which held her there stiff and tense on the seat. She closed her eyes and tried to calm herself but she couldn’t. She tried to swallow over the dryness covering her throat but she couldn’t even manage to do that. Her heart was hammering away against her breastbone, her breathing scored by fear.
Enrico watched her through narrowed glinting eyes. She had turned as white as a sheet and her closed eyelids were showing the fine bruising of strain. A streak of angry remorse ripped through him. He had not meant to scare her so badly when he’d had to hurriedly revise travelling arrangements on Fredo’s advice. And it had actually suited him to keep the small boy out of the loop for now, while they were still fighting so many battles on every front.
He needed to keep the pressure on. If he relaxed it for a second she was going to walk away. Freya had to know as well as he did that he had no leg to stand on where Nicolo was concerned unless he travelled the long legal route through the courts to prove paternity.
At the moment, plain bullying was all he had going for him. Blunt tactics to keep her off balance and therefore easier to manipulate.
He wanted his son. In all his life he had never felt this powerfully overwhelmed by anything—unless he let his mind shift back three years to a moment he’d found this woman in bed with his cousin. For a moment he had been overwhelmed—with the desire to kill.
They left the London City perimeter and headed into Mayfair, accompanied by a silence inside the luxury car that stung and throbbed.
‘Separating you from Nicolo was not a deliberate act of cruelty on my part,’ he heard himself utter in a driven undertone and wondered why, after what he’d just told himself, he was now defending the deed.
‘It’s never happened before—never,’ she whispered. ‘He always goes everywhere with me.’
She turned her head to look at him, her eyes sparkling bright with vulnerable tears now.
Vulnerability got to him. His lips parted to offer an apology.
Then closed again. What a sucker, he mocked himself; so was his body, as that hungry animal called sexual desire leapt up inside to sink its burning sharp teeth into him and make him want to flatten her to the seat and remove that look by very physical means.
Hell, he was a bubbling collection of unfamiliar responses now. Did she think that she was the only one struggling to hold it together? This afternoon had been one long emotional roller-coaster ride since he’d stepped into Hannard’s foyer.
And indulging in some hot, no-finesse sex in his office had not slowed down the ride any, he thought grimly. If anything, it had speeded it up and he’d been running on pure instinct ever since.
Hence the kiss in the lift, the lingering effects of which were still pumping around his system. Now the vulnerable look was feeding it, so was his bad temper and the sting of remorse, plus a thousand other not-so-easy-to-define feelings that were sending messages across the small gap separating them, and she let out a small, choked gasp.
She could feel it, too. Her breathing had quickened. Her colour was coming back, the vulnerable look slowly fading into something else.
The car made a right turn at a set of traffic lights. He lost contact with her eyes as she glanced outside.
‘W-where are we going?’ She began to stiffen.
Time to get tough again, Enrico recognised. ‘My apartment,’ he said. ‘I decided it was best to start as we intend to go on, so your flat has been professionally packed up and should be delivered to my place by the time we arrive there.’
She blinked at him. ‘But how did you get into my flat without—?’
‘I took your keys from your bag while you were in the crèche.’ Enrico pre-empted what was coming and allowed the next wave of shocks to echo between them. Then he went for the big one. ‘Fredo is taking Nicolo to the zoo—to see the monkeys, I believe—so we can have a couple of hours before they arrive to get all the things Nicolo is familiar with unpacked and on show to help ease his confusion.’
He’d found another way to wipe out the vulnerable look, Enrico noted as he watched those green eyes change to chips of ice.
CHAPTER SIX
‘QUITE the control-freak, aren’t you?’ Freya said coldly. ‘I suppose you would love to make me disappear altogether. Then you could claim full control over Nicky!’
‘Tempting proposition,’ Enrico drawled lazily. ‘I will give it some consideration.’
‘And maybe I will do the disappearing without your help,’ she flashed back.
‘With no job and no money to aid you?’ he mocked.
‘I’m not totally without friends.’
Something stirred inside him. ‘Men friends?’ he demanded. ‘Is there a man hiding in the shadows of your life who would be willing to finance this disappearance?’
‘Maybe,’ was all she said.
Something ugly changed the mood in the car. She’d taken him by surprise, Freya realised. It had not entered his arrogant head that there might actually be another man in her life!
‘Who is he?’ Enrico insisted angrily.
Triumph fizzed into life. ‘I don’t have to tell you that.’
The black eyes glinted. ‘You do if you want to leave this car in one piece.’
‘Get Fredo to bring me my son and I might tell you.’
‘We are discussing your disappearance, not my son’s. You can leave whenever you wish to. My son cannot.’
And that, Freya thought bitterly, said just about everything. ‘Unless this man feels that he has prior claim on Nicky, of course…’
She was referring to Luca! Enrico knew that she was referring to Luca. Her heart began to palpitate as she held on to his gaze and watched him flick his eyes away from her, his handsome face turning to cold granite, each beautifully honed feature locking up tight.
The air in the car became too thick to breathe, some soft, weak instinct begging her to take the taunt back.
But he had stolen her son, Freya reminded herself.
Enrico could call it what he liked, but he’d separated the two of them to keep her compliant. That knowledge alone was enough to keep the retraction locked in her throat.
The car came to a timely halt then. Freya escaped by opening her door and climbing out, leaving Enrico sitting there—just sitting, with his cousin’s name ringing inside his head.
A nerve punched in her tense spine as she stood taking in her surroundings. The afternoon was still hot and the sun was shining on the bright white walls of a Georgian property. This was not the same apartment block Enrico had used to live in three years ago; it looked a hell of a lot more palatial.
In fact, it didn’t look like an apartment block at all, but more like a converted house. When Enrico arrived at her side to unlock the front door she wanted to ask questions, but the grim mood between them was conducive only to silence—a hard, tough, don’t-look-at-one-another silence.
Inside, the wide, gracious hallway was the epitome of elegance, with a beautiful stairway leading up to the floor above. Freya had barely glanced around her before a door opened towards the back of the hall and a man appeared, dressed in tight jeans and a white T-shirt.
He pulled to a halt when he saw them. It was Sonny, Enrico’s long-time housekeeper-cum-chef. Sonny was around the same age as Enrico and about as beautiful as a man could be. He was also as gay as they came and proud of it.
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��Thought I heard you come in,’ he said to Enrico, then flicked his gaze to Freya. ‘Ciao, sweetie; long time, no see,’ he greeted. ‘You have had one bambino since we last met, I hear…’
‘Yes,’ she answered—but did Sonny believe that Nicky was Enrico’s son?
It had been Sonny’s day off that time that Luca had come calling. Sonny only knew what he’d been told after the event. Enrico, Fredo and Sonny had grown up together on the huge Ranieri estate. Fredo and Sonny were Enrico’s most trusted friends as well as his employees. If Sonny had heard Enrico’s version, then Luca Ranieri’s face was floating right here in the hallway between them like a cynical, mocking spectre.
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