by Abby Green
Rocco stood there, looking like thunder, with his napkin in his hand. ‘If you’re quite ready? We’ve finished in here.’
George scuttled out as fast as he could for such a huge man, and Gracie leapt to attention, feeling absurdly guilty for no reason. Rocco stayed at the door, forcing her to go past him, and when her hip came into contact with his body she had to stop herself from flinching away. Even that small contact with his tall, hard-muscled body was seismic to her system. She cleared away the plates, glad for the first time that evening that the cold-looking blonde beauty wasn’t looking at her.
When she’d composed herself as much as she could, she went back in with the lemon torte dessert and coffee. Ms Winthrop was saying, ‘Darling, how on earth did you entice Louis away from the Four Seasons? Roberto must be simply livid! That meal was divine.’
A dart of satisfaction went through Gracie as she put down the tray on the nearby serving table. In the silence that followed she found she was holding her breath, waiting to see what Rocco would say. As the seconds ticked past it became incredibly important.
She was picking up the dessert plates and feeling sick inside when he cleared his throat. ‘Actually, Louis was indisposed this evening. So Gracie here, who is my temporary housekeeper, prepared our meal.’
Gracie walked over and put down the plates. She felt a little light-headed for a moment. She couldn’t believe Rocco had actually credited her. For the first time all evening the blonde shot her a narrow-eyed and very assessing glance.
‘Oh … how quaint.’
The words dripped with condescension.
That glance had obviously taken in a multitude of facts, because she looked back to Rocco and said, very deliberately, ‘I wasn’t going to say anything, but I thought perhaps Louis was on an off-night or had sent one of his sous-chefs. The guinea fowl did taste slightly odd. I do hope she knew what she was doing, I have an important family function tomorrow. I can’t afford to be ill.’
Gracie was rooted to the spot for a long moment. She couldn’t believe that this woman was picking apart her efforts as if she wasn’t even there. She registered a quick glance from Rocco, but was too stunned to look at him. She whirled around and escaped back to the kitchen, hearing his low tones as she went, but unable to make out the words.
Gracie was shaking—first of all with shock that Rocco had spoken up for her. She’d fully expected him to humiliate her by denying her contribution, but he’d sounded almost proud. And then shock morphed to anger at that woman’s downright rudeness.
She heard a laugh coming from the drawing room—her irritating laugh. To Gracie’s abject horror emotion surged, making hot tears prick at the back of her eyes as she looked at the chaos spread around the kitchen, the fruits of her hard labours.
She wasn’t sure what had happened, but at some point she’d started cooking for Rocco. George had told her where he was from in Italy, and that had informed her choices. Even whilst hating herself for her weakness, she’d wanted to impress him. Perhaps she’d hoped he would see that she wasn’t just some nobody who had nothing to offer except for a tenuous link to her brother?
She heard a door slam and flinched. No doubt that was Rocco and his date leaving for an exclusive club in town. Gracie wiped at her cheeks and set about cleaning up through a blur of tears.
She didn’t hear the door open, so when she heard a soft, ‘Gracie,’ from behind her she dropped a pan on the marble floor.
Gracie whirled around, too startled to remember how she must look. Her eyes cleared but her cheeks still stung. Rocco was standing there, his jacket removed and his tie undone and loose as if he’d yanked at it impatiently. The top button of his shirt was open and his hair was dishevelled.
Gracie took all this in in a split second. ‘I heard the front door,’ she said dumbly, wondering if he was some kind of mirage. ‘I thought you’d left.’
Rocco shook his head. His hands were deep in his pockets and even now Gracie had to fight the impulse to let her gaze drop.
His voice was tight. ‘Miss Winthrop has gone home, and she won’t be back. I must apologise for her rudeness. She refused to come in here and do it herself.’
Gracie’s mouth opened and closed like a fish. ‘You asked her to come in here? And apologise?’
Rocco nodded curtly. ‘I shouldn’t have even had to ask. She had no right to talk to you like that. And she was wrong. You served up an amazing meal.’ He shook his head slightly. ‘I had no idea you could cook like that.’
Half dazed, Gracie said, ‘One of my foster parents trained in Paris as a chef in the sixties. She ended up working as a cook in a school kitchen when she came back to England because no one would hire a female chef.’ Gracie shrugged. ‘I’m not that proficient, really … I picked up some basics and I like cooking.’
Rocco stepped further into the kitchen and Gracie gulped. He looked so intent. She moved back a step and her foot knocked the pan on the floor. She looked down to see that some sauce had leaked out and automatically bent down to get it. Suddenly Rocco was there, taking her arm and helping her up, taking the pan out of her hand.
He led her away from the spill. ‘No,’ he said, his accent thick. ‘Someone else will clean it up.’
Gracie just looked up at him. He was too close all of a sudden, his sheer physical presence more than overwhelming, and she was horribly aware of her red eyes. She hated that she had been so upset and was terrified Rocco would see it.
‘You don’t have to apologise. She’s the one who was rude.’
‘But I put you in that position. I let her speak to you like that.’
Gracie couldn’t keep the hurt from her voice. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you did. I thought you did it on purpose. To get some pleasure out of seeing me squirm. Seeing me out of my depth.’
Rocco shook his head, and the look on his face made tendrils of heat coil up inside her—along with panic. She didn’t know if she could control her response when Rocco stood this close to her, touching her. And that awful uncontrollable emotion was rising again, that sense of how vulnerable she’d felt this evening. She hadn’t felt a need to impress someone for a long time—if ever.
Gracie spoke with a rush. ‘She looked through me, and then she looked at me as if I was dirt, as if she couldn’t believe that I’d actually handled her food.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
Confusion warred alongside the panic within Gracie. She didn’t know what Rocco was trying to do to her. He was looking at her so intensely. ‘Stop saying that. You’re not sorry at all.’
Tears were blurring her vision again, and Gracie fought not to let them fall, blinking rapidly. He’d reduced her to a snivelling wreck—why wasn’t he walking away? Anger at her response, and at him for precipitating it, made her lash out as she tried to extricate her arm from his grip.
‘Do you know what it’s like to be looked through? As if you don’t exist? Do you have any idea how that feels? I am someone, Rocco. I am a person with hopes and dreams and feelings. I’m not a bad person, despite what you might think. When someone looks through you like you’re invisible—’
‘Gracie …’
Rocco had taken both her arms in his hands now. He was standing right in front of her, gripping her tight. She sucked in a shaky breath.
He spoke again. ‘I know … I know what it’s like.’
Faint scorn laced Gracie’s voice. ‘How can you know? You have no idea what I’m talking about.’
His hands gripped tighter. There was a white line of tension around his mouth and his eyes were blazing. ‘I know.’
His hands gentled then, and Gracie stared up, dumbfounded. One hand came up to her chin and with his thumb and forefinger he tipped her face up higher, so she couldn’t escape his gaze.
‘I see you.’
Emotions were roiling in Gracie’s belly. She felt hot all over. Confusion warred with the anger inside her, and she shook her head. ‘You don’t … You can’t. I’m nothing to you.’
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Fiercely, he shook his head. ‘No. You are not nothing.’
Gracie was dimly aware that in their backward-forward dance they had now moved into a more dimly lit corner of the kitchen by the window seat. She could feel her hair unravelling. The entire world might have stopped turning in that moment and she wouldn’t have noticed. All she could see were the black depths of Rocco’s eyes and she was drowning. She had to fight the pull of the strongest tide she’d ever felt.
‘Rocco …’ Her voice was shaky. ‘What are you doing? Why are you here?’
Her lower arms were between them, as if she was still valiantly making the effort to pull free from Rocco’s hands. But his hands had gentled, and yet Gracie couldn’t move back or break free. Some fatal lethargy had invaded her bones and her blood. He pulled her in closer.
He didn’t speak for a long moment, and then it was as if the words were being pulled out from deep inside him. ‘I want you. I am here because I want you. This whole evening, this past week, ever since I met you … I’ve wanted you. Not her. She guessed how I felt. That’s why she was so cruel.’
Gracie shook her head even as molten heat seemed to bloom down low between her legs. She’d never felt so hot. And so out of her depth. She’d truly believed that her guilty little secret of obsessing about Rocco would never be noticed. Or reciprocated.
Gracie shook her head again, more forcefully this time. ‘No. You’re bored … or trying to make her jealous or something. I’m just convenient.’
Rocco grimaced then. ‘You’re definitely not convenient. And I am not bored. I don’t care if she is jealous, because it’s over and I’m never going to see her again.’
Gracie reeled. The full magnitude of what he was saying started to sink in. He’d had a fight with his fiancée over her? And he’d chosen her?
‘But … you had a relationship. You were going to marry her.’
Rocco went still for a second as the enormity of her words sank in. He had just ended his relationship with Honora Winthrop, and in doing so his grand plans to marry her. He’d done it because he wanted to sleep with Gracie O’Brien more urgently than he’d ever wanted anything in his life. More than the social acceptance he’d hungered for for so long? He didn’t even want to answer that.
In some rational part of his brain that was still functioning Rocco knew very well that if he ran after Honora Winthrop and caught her just as she reached home he might salvage something.
And like a slow-dawning yet cataclysmic realisation he knew he didn’t want to. The feeling of claustrophobia that had been dogging him for weeks had lifted.
Rocco shook his head. ‘We didn’t have a relationship—not really. What we had was an understanding that a more permanent relationship would be mutually beneficial on many levels.’
‘But that’s … so cold.’
Rocco shrugged and said cynically, ‘That’s life. I hadn’t yet asked her to marry me, and I haven’t been sleeping with her.’
Gracie was trying to take it all in. She knew that Rocco wouldn’t feel he had to hand her platitudes to get her into bed. She believed that he hadn’t cared for that woman, and that he hadn’t slept with her. He was too powerful to care about lying. She knew he wouldn’t shy away from hurting her with the truth if he had slept with that woman.
Her head started to throb. She couldn’t take any more in. She didn’t want to hear anything else. Rocco pulled her even closer. She felt as if she was on a train with only one destination and there was no way she could get off now. Unconsciously she’d gone up on tiptoe, her body knowing what it wanted even before she did.
His head lowered towards hers, that beautiful mouth came closer and closer, and Gracie’s eyelids fluttered closed just as darkness and heat swept over her mouth and settled there like a brand.
At first the kiss was like falling into a whirlpool. Instinctively Gracie reached out to hold onto Rocco’s shirt because she couldn’t feel her legs any more. And then an urgency gripped them both, as if the first taste was merely a civilised veneer. Rocco’s hands went to Gracie’s face. She was being backed against a wall, or some sort of solid surface, and Gracie leaned back and let it support her weight.
Rocco’s mouth was hard, and yet his lips were soft, pressing, tasting, coaxing. She felt the slide of his tongue against the closed seam of her lips and her hands clenched tighter as her mouth opened up to Rocco. The kiss deepened. His chest pressed hard against her, crushing her hands between them. But Gracie didn’t care. She revelled in Rocco’s big hands holding her face just so he could plunder her mouth.
Gracie was falling, slipping and sliding into another dimension. Rocco’s scent intoxicated her. His tongue stroked along hers in a wicked caress. Teeth nipped at her lower lip, only to soothe it in the same moment. It was tart and sweet all at once. It was all-consuming, like jumping right into the middle of a fire.
He took his mouth away and amidst the fiery excitement pressed a kiss to the corner of her mouth—an incongruously gentle gesture. Gracie opened heavy eyelids. Her mouth felt bruised, swollen. She wouldn’t be surprised if the world had moved on a couple of decades since they’d started kissing. She felt that altered.
She looked straight up into the dark molten pools of Rocco’s eyes. This close she could see flecks of gold. His cheeks were flushed.
Feeling bewildered, she asked shakily, ‘What is this?’
Rocco took down his hands from her face and caught some of her hair, wrapping it around a finger, looking at the fiery gold strands.
‘This …’ his gaze came back up ‘… is called chemistry—except I’ve never felt it like this before.’
Gracie shook her head. ‘I’ve never felt this before either.’
Rocco’s hand moved slowly up over Gracie’s hip to her waist, and then under one arm to rest where her breast curved out. With a lazy smile Rocco moved his hand so it cupped her breast, the thumb moving back and forth over the taut peak which tightened even more underneath the stiff material of her dress. Her breath hitched.
‘This,’ Rocco continued, ‘is what started between us the night we met.’
Gracie’s eyes searched Rocco’s for sincerity. So he’d felt it too. This extraordinary connection. Like a livewire coming to life the moment she’d looked at him. This had nothing to do with her brother. This had existed between them before they’d even known who the other was.
Suddenly a desperate urgency Gracie had never felt before rushed through her body. She needed to connect on a base level with this man right now. She lifted her hands from between them and caught his head, his hair soft and silky between her fingers. Inexorably she brought his head down to hers and pressed her mouth to his. He took her cue and both hands moved to grip her waist tightly as his mouth opened and his natural dominance took over.
Tongues met and clashed furiously. Gracie arched herself into the hard wall of his chest, crushing her breasts to him, desperately seeking to assuage the ache building throughout her whole body and between her legs. Their hips were tight together. Gracie could feel the long ridge of his arousal and instinctively opened her legs to increase the contact and friction.
She was barely aware of Rocco tugging the tiny apron free and moving his hands to the buttons of her dress, ripping them apart. Cool air touched her heated skin and she craved to be free of her constricting garments, nearly sobbing out loud when she felt Rocco’s big hands pull the top of the dress apart to bare her breasts to his gaze. She vaguely heard material rip.
He drew back from the kiss and looked down, breathing harshly. Gracie was dizzy, heart racing like an express train. She couldn’t get enough oxygen to her brain. Rocco’s eyes were feverish. As much as he could he pushed the shoulders of her dress down, baring even more of her breasts. The pale skin was framed by a black bra, not racy in the slightest. But Gracie was beyond caring. She needed this man’s touch, his mouth …
As if reading her mind, Rocco pulled down one cup, forcing her plump breast to spring free. As if hypnot
ised, Rocco cupped and caressed her breast, a thumb stroking the peak back and forth. Gracie bit her lip to stop herself from begging.
Excitement zinged through her veins when his dark head lowered and finally the wet sucking heat of his mouth surrounded that taut peak. His tongue rolled around it, sucking it into even more tightness. Gracie’s head fell back against the wall, the pain unnoticed in the haze of pleasure infusing her body. Her hips were squirming, undulating against Rocco’s, her legs had parted even more and his erection was long and hard and thick against her sensitive sex.
Gracie wanted to see him unclothed and started searching for his shirt, clumsy hands fumbling with his buttons. He took his mouth away from her breast and stood up.
Rocco’s head was consumed by fire. A fire of lust and desire and need too great to deny. Gracie was half slumped against the wall behind her. His hips grinding into hers was probably the only thing still keeping her standing. Her mouth was dark pink and swollen. Eyes huge with pupils so dilated they looked black.
Her fast breaths made her pale breasts rise and fall enticingly. She had small tight pink nipples, surrounded by slightly darker areolae and freckles. Rocco felt a sense of inevitability sink into his bones. This woman was his.
He knew he couldn’t rationalise that assertion now. He could only act on the singularly strongest driving force of his life: to have her and make her his.
With impatience making his usually graceful movements jerky, Rocco opened his shirt, buttons popping off around them. He looked at Gracie’s half-open dress. It had to come off over her head. He brought his hands to the thin material and ripped it all the way to the hem. His blood was pumping now. Her dress gaped open down to her thighs, giving a glimpse of black panties.
He felt feral. He felt wild. He’d never felt like this with another woman.
He looked at Gracie and forced himself to grind out, ‘We’re doing this right here, right now. Unless you say no. You have about ten seconds to decide.’
CHAPTER SIX
GRACIE looked up at Rocco, towering above her, making her feel impossibly small and delicate. The sheer stark hunger stamped onto his features was awesome and almost frightening. But she wasn’t frightened. She hadn’t even blinked when he’d ripped her dress open like some kind of animal. It had excited her.