by Dani Collins
Since when did he not embrace power? He loved it!
But he was suddenly confronted with how vulnerable she was. To all the men in her life, but especially to him, right now. It slapped at his conscience, made him think again about her saying he would protect his father. The joke was on her. His real mother had been light-years ahead of his father in social status, belonging to the Donatelli banking clan. His father had been on the bottom of society’s spectrum. A criminal of the vilest order.
He had cold-bloodedly seduced her with an eye to his own gain.
What are you doing, Vito? he chided himself.
He was protecting the bank, he reminded himself. And his blood was decidedly hot when Gwyn’s hand was in his own.
He strolled her through the late morning sun, ignoring the cameras, entering every boutique on the promenade and refusing to leave without making a purchase.
But for a woman who only needed to act enamored to get herself out of trouble, she did a lousy job of it. She wasn’t outright defiant. No, her resistance was subtle enough to give credence to what she had said earlier about not wanting to look like a gold digger. She needed cajoling to enter a change room, pulled a face at the prices and frowned at the growing number of bags he was having sent back to the yacht club.
It was beyond his experience. Every woman he knew enjoyed being spoiled this way, whether sisters, mother or lovers. He had been raised to be chivalrous, and not only owned a sizable number of shares in the bank, but investing was his living. He made more money in a day than he could spend in a week. This was pocket change.
He began taking special care, looking for items that were particularly flattering to her, complimenting her, trying to soften that spine and coax a smile of pleasure out of her. Why couldn’t she relax and see the fun in this?
A motorcycle jacket with a faux fur collar and narrow sleeves that capped the tops of her hands to her knuckles looked genuinely delightful on her. He stood behind her as she eyed it in the mirror.
“It suits you. Makes you look as tough as you are,” he said.
She met his gaze in the mirror. “You do this a lot, don’t you? I honestly didn’t see you as the kind of guy who had to buy his women.”
She might as well have butted that hard head of hers back into his lip and nose. He tightened his hands on her shoulders to freeze her in place.
Her gaze met his again and she saw the danger there, stilling, hand on the zipper of the jacket.
“Be very careful what you say to me, cara.”
“You want those vultures out there to believe this,” she said with a small toss of her head to the front of the store, where music was blaring so loudly they could barely hear each other even back here. “I don’t have to. Or does your ego demand that I fall for you for real?”
Once again she had him thinking about a powerful man exploiting a vulnerable young woman.
That wasn’t what this was.
She moved the zipper an inch then shrugged his hands off her shoulders. “Buy it if you think I should have it. I don’t care.”
The hell of it was, he believed her.
* * *
Gwyn watched cute sundresses and silk scarves, two hats and a designer bag that cost the earth all go into colorful boutique bags. Vito told her they’d buy evening gowns in Milan—for what?—but insisted she get trendy jeans, cocktail skirts and flirty tops, lingerie that she flatly refused to let him watch her try on and shoes. Dear Lord, the shoes.
Deep in her most covetous, most materialistic heart, she adored Italian-made shoes. She’d been saving up for a pair, browsing regularly as she debated whether to be practical and buy something she might wear often or ridiculously capricious and own something that would sit in a box in her closet, to be worn on only a few special occasions.
Vito bought her six pairs of very chic, very expensive day shoes and completely dismissed them as, “They’ll do for now.” More, he assured her, would be purchased with the gowns in the city.
She might have protested, but he was already angry with her. That moment at the mirror had made her tremble inside, he’d looked so lethal. At the same time, she knew he wouldn’t hurt her physically. It was her heart, her own ego and self-confidence that were in peril.
Especially because, despite her nastiness, he didn’t let up on his solicitude. They walked from store to store and paparazzi swarmed around them, clicking and flashing and capturing every murmur and expression. One called something particularly disgusting and she flinched.
“Ignore them,” Vito growled, drawing her closer to the shelter of his big body, brushing his lips against the tip of her ear as he spoke, then smoothed his fingers through the tails of her loose hair, caressing her waist, so attentive to her needs.
She imagined she looked deeply smitten every time he touched her like this. That’s why she’d had to insult him and drive a wedge between them. Her response to his pretend seduction was dangerously real. Her nipples tightened when all he did was touch the small of her back. She flushed with desire when she inhaled the scent of his neck.
How was she so comfortable under his touch? That’s what she wanted to know. Normally she was quite standoffish with men. If they so much as took her elbow while they walked her down the street, she found the presumptiveness of it annoying.
Not Vito. Her skin called out for each light graze of contact. She was in a perpetual state of readiness, skin sensitized and aching with anticipation, eager for his merest caress. She wanted him to smother her with his big body. Absorb her.
In some ways it was exhausting. She was incredibly relieved when he pointed to a car with a chauffeur in sunglasses leaning against it, reading his phone. “We’ll take a drive to some viewpoints, see if we can lose these cameras before we head back to the house.”
Their last two boutique bags went into the trunk where the myriad of other purchases were now arranged along with dry cleaner bags holding the clothing they’d worn last night. The man really was a demigod, taking care of the dreary details of life with what seemed like a magical snap of his finger and thumb. Forget the other conquests who fell for this routine. She was becoming one of them. How could any woman not find this level of provision seductive?
She settled with a sigh on the leather seat in the back, pretending she wasn’t aware of the scooters that kept buzzing up beside them for the next ten minutes as they drove into the hills. The windows were blacked out, however, so the followers soon fell away, accepting that their opportunity was over and they might as well go file the photos they had and collect their payments.
The car climbed high above the lake, the twists in the road taking them into stretches of quiet thoroughfare, where she finally let out her breath in a sigh.
Vito leaned forward to close the privacy window and poured both of them a water from the bottle in the door.
“Was it so bad?” he asked. “Spending my money?”
“No,” she said, adding a sarcastic, “How was it for you?”
She heard how suggestive that sounded and made a noise into her glass.
“Why does everything I say come out sounding dirty around you?” she muttered.
“Freudian slip?” he suggested.
She slid her thumb along the rim of her glass, blushing and saying nothing.
“Your silence speaks volumes,” he taunted.
“Am I the first woman to find you attractive? I doubt it,” she said caustically.
“You’re the first to be so annoyed by it,” he said with a hint of laughter in his voice. “Why? Because you’re so tempted?”
“I’ve never been a drug user and that’s what it would be,” she muttered. “You’re sitting there like a giant painkiller promising to keep me from feeling the bus that’s crushing me. So, yes, I’m tempted.” She couldn’t believe how honest she was being. It wasn’t like her to be this blunt, but what shred of dignity was left to lose? “But I’ve never gone to bed with a man purely for physical release. It makes me feel cheap to co
nsider it.”
“You’re incredibly insulting when you want to be, aren’t you? The problem, I think, is that you don’t know how powerful this particular painkiller will be.” He leaned across and set her glass in her door. His was gone and his hands went to her waist. “Come here.”
“What—?”
He dragged her to straddle his thighs, making her stiffen in surprise at the sudden intimacy of having her legs open across him, her inner thighs lightly stretched by the press of his thick, hard ones.
She kept her arms stiff, holding herself off him, but she was intrigued despite her wariness. “There’s no one to see this performance,” she reminded tautly.
“Yes, I know,” he said smokily, and stroked his hands up and down her thighs, massaging in a way that sent ripples of anticipation into her pelvis. With a little shift, he slouched and they were sex to sex, her tingling loins firmly seated against the very hard ridge of his erection.
“If only I still worked for you and could charge you with sexual harassment,” she said, but her voice had thinned and her twitching thighs wouldn’t cooperate enough to lift her away.
“I don’t have to buy women, cara. They come to me for this.” His hips came up just enough to press where too many nerve endings were centered. She bucked in an allover response, gasping.
“You’re so full of yourself,” she told him, shivering, not fighting the hands that pressed her hips so she felt that delicious grind again.
The corners of his mouth deepened in satisfied amusement. “Let’s see which one of us wants to be full of me, hmm?” His hand slid up her side, across her shoulder to cup the side of her neck.
A trail of tingles followed his caress, sensitizing her, making her go still when self-preservation instincts told her to get the hell off his lap.
As he exerted a tiny pressure, urging her forward, asking for her mouth against his, she gave in.
It’s only a kiss. They’d done it before.
But this wasn’t a kiss. It was a match to a flame.
As her mouth reached his, he captured her in a hungry kiss, like last night, only hotter. With a confident hand on her butt, he rocked her against his erection, making her shudder and take over the move herself, seeking the rhythm that would build the desire in the heated, dampening flesh between her legs.
Distantly she told herself to be cautious, remember this was about the bank. He was only doing this to prove a point, but her arms went around his neck in a kind of instinctive twine. She pressed to crush her breasts against his chest. Their tongues tangled and they both opened their mouths to deepen the kiss into something flagrant and wildly passionate.
Maybe there was something else she ought to have been thinking about, fretting over, but few thoughts of any clarity stuck after that. She became a being of pure sensation. All her awareness centered on the points where they touched, how he stroked her back and hips, how her body prickled and responded like firecrackers were exploding at different points.
His hand slid to cup her breast, weighing and gently massaging. She rubbed her nipple into his palm, never so free when it came to sex. Maybe if he’d seemed surprised by her lack of inhibition, she would have pulled back, but he groaned with appreciation, encouraging her, giving her all the pressure she needed as he shaped and squeezed her breast. She loved the way the light fabric of her top and silky cami made it easy for him to find and tantalize her nipple, pinching the peak and causing a stab of arousal straight between her legs.
She gasped and moaned approval. More heat rushed to pool in her loins, making her ache there and seek that hard ridge. She rubbed, trying to soothe the needy throb between her legs, unable to remember the last time she’d had any sex, let alone thrown herself into it like this. No man had ever aroused her this quickly and thoroughly with little more than a kiss and a few brazen caresses.
She arched as his other hand found its way beneath her top and pulled her cami askew, so he could pull back and look at her through the translucent film of her overtop. They both watched his thumb circle her nipple, flicking back and forth, stimulating the tight bead so she shuddered and panted, scalp tight, excited beyond what she could imagine could happen from such a simple bit of teasing.
“Come here,” he said, urging her to lift on her knees and push her nipple toward his mouth.
She did, bracing her hands on his shoulders, vaguely aware they were in a moving car. Maybe the blur around them was empty of humans, but the darkened glass at her back wasn’t. She ought to be showing more decorum, but his tongue moved the silk of her top against her nipple in delicate friction. The dampness of his mouth enclosed her in heat, sucking and inciting. She was lost, groaning with delight as he tortured her, licking and moving that damp fabric, squeezing the swell of her breast just enough to push more blood into the tip.
She was going to climax from this alone, she thought, working her nails with agitation against his shirt, thinking she should stop this, but she was compelled to keep going because it felt so damned good.
Her waistband released and his other hand slid in, confident and possessive, cupping soaked lace, saying something in Italian she didn’t have the wherewithal to interpret, but he sounded pleased. Like he was complimenting her. She absolutely flowered when he sounded so appreciative and admiring.
He held his palm steady for her to grind herself into the heel of his hand. She moaned with pleasure as her arousal became acute. She tore at his collar and tried to stroke his skin, wanted to bend and kiss him, but as she pulled back, he stared at her chest.
“Give me the other one,” he growled, eyeing her left breast, still tucked away.
With trembling hands, she lifted her top out of the way, pushed the cami down so her breasts were thrusting out the top of it, brazen in the extreme—
He opened his mouth wide on her bare nipple and she nearly screamed at the sensation of his teeth closing softly, dragging all the way to the tip before he sucked her into the deep, wet cavern of heat that was his greedy mouth.
A rush of need flooded into her sex. Into his palm.
He made an animalistic noise and his fingers pushed past silk, fingertips seeking, two penetrating, burying deep, thumb tracing and finding. Circling.
“Yes,” she gasped, giving herself up to the stunning height of pleasure, welcoming the thrust of his fingers, clasping him hard to her breast as he nipped in a way that was just short of pain. The sensations he was offering were so sharp and intense it was almost too much to bear. She clenched, trying to hold back, realizing how close she was to losing it. This wasn’t what she’d meant to happen.
His arm clamped around her waist and he kept lashing her with those twin sensations until she couldn’t hold back. Orgasm crashed over her. Her body nearly buckled under the power of it. Her cries of abandon filled the backseat and she pressed her hands to the ceiling, all of herself offered to him as he pleasured her, nearly bursting into jagged tears at the intensity of her release. Dying. She was dying and would never breathe again.
The paroxysm held her for a long time, until she slowly became aware that his caress had become soothing.
His damp hand moved, sliding onto her hip then cupping her backside, urging her to nestle her tender, throbbing flesh against the aggressive ridge of his erection straining the front of his pants. He lifted his head and licked at her panting mouth, teasing her into kissing him back.
She was still shaking with reaction and kept her eyes closed as she kissed him with swollen, trembling lips, aware of his hardness everywhere: shoulders, arms, thighs. Even his lips were firm where hers were soft with spent pleasure. His heart was pounding while she was still trying to catch her breath, both of them damp with perspiration.
Finally she dragged her eyes open to see he had a very smug, satisfied light in his half-closed eyes. That arrogance was unnerving, making her realize he had completely taken her apart while losing none of his own control. Only his collar was slightly askew, his hair barely out of place.
&
nbsp; He told her in a low growl what he wanted to do to her.
What was wrong with her that she responded with an internal clench of anticipation to his dirty talk?
She pushed off his lap and shakily tidied her clothes, avoiding his gaze, trying not to think of where his hand had been. How she’d sounded as she called out with release. Had the driver heard her? How did things just keep getting more mortifying?
She managed to rally, responding to what he’d said with a scathing, “The way you’re looking so self-satisfied, I’d think we already did that.”
He angled to look at her, reaching to smooth a wisp of her hair from its tangle on her eyelashes. Her pulse leaped with excitement, but his finger didn’t even brush her skin.
“It was bothering me that other men had seen you naked. But no man has ever seen you like that, have they? I’m very satisfied.”
What an egotistical—
“You’re a jerk,” she told him, thinking there were saltier words and she was tempted to find them.
“Are you losing the feel-good already? Because I’m right here, ready and willing to take you to your happy place all over again.”
“Oh, shut up,” she snapped, turning her face to the window. Pride. Who knew it was such an unaffordable luxury?
CHAPTER SIX
GWYN DIDN’T KNOW how close she’d just come to being taken in the backseat under the straying eye of his driver. Oh, Carlo would have known they were petting, would have turned up the music so he wouldn’t hear anything indelicate, but neither he nor Gwyn knew that Vito had nearly lost control, so caught up in Gwyn’s pleasure he’d almost found his own, fully clothed and completely at her service. He’d barely stopped himself from rolling her beneath him on the seat, stripping them bare and quite possibly planting a baby in her without a single thought for the consequences.
The thought disturbed him. Was that how he’d been conceived? In a fit of blind passion that completely disregarded the impact to the woman in question?
By the few accounts Vito had from his adoptive parents, his mother had been deeply infatuated, if far too young and naive for a thirtysomething gangster with a pitiless determination to get whatever he wanted. He had wanted Antoinietta Donatelli. He had seduced her. His family had always sworn up, down and sideways that Vito wasn’t a product of rape. No, he was the product of a man taking advantage of a woman who didn’t have nearly the worldliness needed to resist him.