Eventually they moved, though, eventually with seemingly perfect sensory co-ordination he withdrew from her just as she reached the point where she needed to stretch her limbs to encourage them to recover some substance. With a lazy kiss pressed to her throat, he slid himself sideways, bent a knee across her thighs as if to make sure she didn’t decide to stray, then came up on one elbow to look down on her gravely while gentle fingers carefully combed stray locks of her hair away from her face and throat and shoulders.
It was an act of tenderness she had not expected, and her throat tightened slightly on a tug of emotion as she lay there.
‘You said my name,’ he murmured suddenly.
Her long lashes flickered on a blink of surprise. ‘I did?’ she responded, having no memory of saying anything, she had been so lost to her senses.
He smiled an oddly satisfied smile. ‘Sí,’ he confirmed. ‘You called for me, Giancarlo, at your moment of ecstasy. It—pleased me.’
She could see that it did. But the remark still confused her. ‘Who else did you expect me to call for?’ she enquired with a little frown and teasing glint of amusement.
His response threw her. Instead of coming up with some answering tease to keep the same soft, intimate mood flowing, his face hardened and he growled something harsh in his own language, then swooped on her mouth with the kind of kiss that staked a claim she didn’t think was necessary since he already possessed her.
‘Mine,’ he reiterated fiercely when he drew away again. ‘You are my woman now, you understand me? You think only of me, you say only my name, and you dream only of me, comprende?’
‘Oh, very possessive,’ she mocked, not sure whether to be pleased by the burst of jealous possessiveness or angry at him for feeling he needed to stake his claim!
‘Sí,’ he confirmed, no shame, no apology. ‘I am Sicilian,’ he added with a lift of his chin that seemed to be conveying something portentous in that announcement. ‘I guard what belongs to me.’
‘And you think I now belong to you, is that it?’
‘Sí.’
‘And who do you belong to?’
‘You, of course.’ He frowned as if he didn’t see the necessity for the question.
Which was Natalia’s point, because neither did she see the necessity for this conversation at all! Unless this was his roundabout way of getting down to laying out the ground rules, she then thought on a sudden tight sting of understanding. ‘How long for?’ she asked huskily.
His frown darkened. ‘For as long as it lasts, I suppose,’ he answered. ‘Who can say?’ he added with what she supposed was a very Sicilian noncommittal shrug to go with his question.
But the shrug came too late, because Natalia was already ahead of him, ahead and walking along the self-same line. ‘S-six weeks,’ she heard herself say in a breathless tense little whisper, needing now to lay out the terms of this affair before he did it for her. ‘When Edward comes back, you go home, and this will be over…’
Edward—? She dared to bring Edward, here, into his bed after what they had just shared? She dared to speak Edward’s name? Lay her rules about the length of their affair before him—in words that revolved around Edward?
Like a man who had just been attacked by a snake, he flinched right back from her, his eyes turning black as the vision in front of him changed from beauty personified in his eyes into Medusa—turning him into a pillar of stone where he lay.
Nothing that had ever happened to him before had made him feel as bad as he did right now. For here they were, having only just recovered from one of the most passionate interludes life could offer—and she was bartering terms like a whore in the market place. But with those terms revolving around Edward?
Anger suddenly roared, pumping the life right back into his frozen limbs to help throw his body round until he was looming threateningly over her. Unsure at this point if he was going to strangle her or kiss her darling Edward right out of existence, he reached for her shoulders.
She stiffened in alarm. ‘What did I do? What did I say?’ she begged in complete bewilderment as to why he was suddenly so angry. In her view, he supposed, she had just handed him the perfect excuse for dumping her and he should be damn well singing in elation!
But he wasn’t singing, he was seething, because she had just confirmed every low, cheap, nasty thing he had ever been told about her. Brazen wasn’t in it. ‘You dare to set boundaries of time around me,’ he bit out thickly, ‘as if I am a stud bull in a field lingering with the female currently in line to be serviced—and then wonder why I am angry?’
She went quite white, and so she should do, he acknowledged as he watched remorse darken her beautiful eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ she breathed. ‘I didn’t mean… I just thought you—’
‘Well, don’t think,’ he growled. ‘Not in my bed—ever!’
Then, because he couldn’t stop himself, he buried his mouth in hers and wished to God he knew where this was going to take him, because something nasty was warning him that he was in too deep.
Natalia Deyton was beginning to get to him in ways he just hadn’t expected…
CHAPTER EIGHT
NATALIA had offended Giancarlo and she hadn’t meant to do that. In fact the last thing she ever wanted to do was spoil what had been the most beautiful experience of her life.
So when he kissed her she kissed him back hungrily. He was angry, so the kiss was rough, but the anger also ignited other emotions, which soon began to take them over.
For a second experience so soon after the first, it really should have been disappointing. But it seemed as if nothing this man could do would ever disappoint her. He drove deep and she welcomed his potency. He kissed hard and long and she fed it all back to him. They touched and tasted and lost touch with everything but themselves to an extent that it didn’t even register that they were doing all of this without a single thought to protection.
That singularly terrifying occurrence happened when she was standing in his bathroom, carefully drying tender places after their shower in which their third wild coming together had taken them tumbling over the edge of sanity.
‘Oh, no,’ she whispered, going so still that it was no wonder he spun sharply to face her.
He was standing by the bathroom mirror with a towel looped casually around his lean waist while he used an electric razor, but the sound stopped abruptly when he saw her expression. ‘What?’ he demanded. ‘What have you done?’ His eyes dipped down to where her hand was tensely crushing the towel, then blackened in concern as they flicked back to her face again. ‘Did I hurt you, cara?’ he questioned jerkily.
She shook her head, her face so white it could have been porcelain. ‘Y-you didn’t use anything,’ she managed to utter.
He froze, frowning, then slowly put down the razor to begin walking towards her. ‘This is a joke, right,’ he murmured.
But he had to know that it wasn’t. She still hadn’t moved and didn’t think she dared to. Her legs felt strange, as if they were just about ready to give out on her, and her heart was labouring to find a steady rhythm.
‘No,’ she breathed, and began to shiver as shock thoroughly took her over.
Several Italian curses hit her eardrums, but he made a grab for a fresh towel and quickly wrapped it around her before grimly picking her up and carrying her back into the bedroom.
He sat her down on the bed, then swung round to sit down heavily beside her. He was in shock too, she recognised. Or maybe she should describe it as horror. ‘How could we have been so blind stupid?’ she choked.
‘You are on the pill,’ he bit out tautly. ‘All women take the pill!’
‘Well, not this one!’ she shot back, fiercely and furiously. ‘God—’ she jumped up. ‘I should have known this was going to turn nasty on me! You’re the wrong man for me! We shouldn’t even have been doing this—!’
‘I am not the wrong man for you!’ he barked, instantly offended by the suggestion.
But he didn’t und
erstand and she couldn’t explain it to him, so she began pacing the floor with the towel huddled round her, trying to come to terms with the dreadful fact that she might well already be pregnant with Edward’s wife’s brother’s child!
‘Oh.’ The whimper was one of dismay and helplessness. ‘Why didn’t you think to ask?’ she suddenly launched at him.
He was white behind the olive tint of his skin and his eyes were angry. ‘Why did you not think to say?’ he tossed back with biting derision.
‘Because I did believe that most intelligent men thought safe sex a natural precaution!’ she spat back, not knowing why she was attacking him like this when she knew she was as much to blame.
He jerked to his feet, and she instantly felt wretched because his cheekbones were no longer pale but dark with embarrassment. There seemed nothing left to say. As he walked off towards the bathroom again, she began gathering her scattered clothes together in a dazed kind of way that said she didn’t know what she was doing.
By the time he came back a few minutes later he seemed to have himself back in control while she was just standing there staring blindly down at the few scraps of white silk she held in her hands, as if she didn’t know how they’d got there.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered when she felt him in front of her. ‘This is my fault. I should have thought…’
‘Ditto,’ Giancarlo replied and wondered why he wasn’t feeling anything more than a rueful acceptance for his tragic lot.
Because she looked so adoringly pathetic? Because she was right and he should have been more careful—for his own health’s sake if nothing else?
Or was it because her shrill claim that he was the wrong man for her had struck at the very heart of his ego and made it more important to him to prove her wrong about that than to stand about in a horrified stupor, wondering how the hell he was going to extricate himself from this potential disaster?
‘What is the timing like?’ he asked, gently extracting the bits of silk from her fingers while she let him because his question had made her pause and take stock of the situation.
‘Good,’ she murmured eventually. ‘Good as in low risk,’ she then extended, which made him grimace because good could only mean that—in this case anyway.
‘Right,’ he acknowledged. ‘Then we have a wait-and-see situation on our hands,’ and he smoothly whipped the towel away from her shoulders.
‘What are you doing?’ she cried, making an attempt to grab it back again.
Too late, for he was already tossing it to one side along with her clothes. ‘Taking you back to bed,’ he said so casually that it even surprised him how calmly he was behaving. He grasped one of her hands. ‘It is three o’clock in the morning and we both need some sleep.’
‘Sleep?’ she repeated.
He turned a grin on her that had her eyes widening. ‘Sleep,’ he repeated. ‘You’ve ravished me enough for one night.’
‘But—’ she was floundering and he liked it ‘—I should be going home and—’
It was the simplest thing in the world to swing her down on the bed then follow her. ‘Home is here now,’ he smoothly decreed. ‘For the next few weeks anyway until we know one way or another.’
‘What are you talking about?’ she protested. ‘I don’t need to live here with you just because we have both behaved recklessly!’
‘Yes, you do,’ he insisted, stripping the towel from his hips and tossing it aside before he reached for the sheet to cover them. ‘I am Sicilian. I take care of my own. And until you prove otherwise, you now belong to me—so don’t even think about taking a morning-after pill. And also,’ he added with husky promise, ‘I want you here. Can you tell me honestly that you do not want to be here too?’
She couldn’t. He knew it. She might claim he was the wrong man for her, but when it came down to it he was the one she wanted.
The only thing she said was, ‘I had no intention of taking a morning-after pill. I don’t agree with them.’
Reaching across her to put out the light, he kissed her delicious mouth as he settled down beside her, then pulled her into his arms.
‘Tomorrow we move your things in,’ he said softly into the darkness.
She didn’t say another word.
He had her. She didn’t know it yet, but he had Natalia Deyton just where he wanted her and, despite the stupid risks it had taken to get her here, he had never felt so good about anything…
To her own surprise, Natalia slept heavily, waking up to find herself alone in the bed as a weak sun began seeping in through the voile-draped windows. She lay there for a while, listening to the warm quietness surrounding her, reluctant to let herself begin thinking of the calamitous events of the night before.
Though not all of them had been calamitous, she admitted, feeling an accompanying warmth filter into those places in her body that had known only pleasure last night. In fact some of those moments had been so intense that it was impossible not to soften and allow them to replay themselves for a little while.
But only a little while, she accepted when a sound from somewhere beyond the bedroom alerted her to the fact that she was not alone here. Giancarlo must be around somewhere, waiting for her to put in an appearance.
A sigh whispered from her, dragging her out of her relaxed stupor and forcing her to get out of bed where she padded off to use the bathroom before going in search of her suit bag, so she could put back on the clothes she had arrived here in yesterday.
They seemed more appropriate somehow, now that daylight was back and with it reality. The slinky blue dress and the sexy underwear belonged to another time and most definitely another person than the one she was seeing in the mirror this morning.
And just who was she seeing? she asked herself as she stood, carefully pleating her hair with the knowledge that she was using the severe style as a piece of armour.
A very foolish woman, she informed herself, who had made a huge mistake that was now clawing at her conscience and grating at worries she should never have put aside in the first place.
Namely—Edward versus Giancarlo Cardinale. Even the name made her feel chill now.
Not the man, though, she admitted as she watched her eyes darken simply by conjuring up his image. The man in his full and physical sense had never been the problem for her. It was his name and his relationship to Edward that caused this impossible conflict she could see no way round whichever way she tried to look at it.
Not that it really mattered now, she supposed, turning to pull on her clothes and make herself presentable. The whole thing had turned sour from the moment she’d realised that neither had thought about contraception.
Oh, he had been good and kind and said all the right things a woman he had just made love to would expect from a real man. But there was no way in the cold light of day that she was going to hold him to any of them. She could only hope that in the cold light of the same day he, too, had thought better about bringing his new lover here to live with him when surely the quick exit and a lot of inner praying was the best way to be dealing with this?
With those very wise thoughts in mind, she slipped her feet into low black court shoes and made herself go in search of him. She found him lounging at the kitchen table with the Financial Times spread open in front of him and a pot of coffee at his elbow.
He looked different this morning, she noted as she paused in the doorway. His clothes were different. Casual chinos and a long-sleeved polo shirt in a dark red colour that for some crazy reason reminded her of the red underwear he had provided yesterday and almost had her blushing.
Luckily the blush didn’t arrive when, sensing her standing there, he looked up, and it only took him a few moments to run his eyes over her prim hairstyle and her equally prim slate-grey suit to know exactly what mood she was in this morning.
‘Standing in guarded territory, I see,’ he drawled, sitting back in his chair to view her more thoroughly. ‘Tell me,’ he appealed, ‘that this does not declare an end
to a beautiful friendship.’
‘Don’t be so trite,’ she snapped, walking forwards and going to the fridge to get herself a carton of juice she had stashed in there yesterday, then opening cupboards until she found the glasses.
‘Then don’t try pulling any neat tricks on me, cara,’ he replied with a sudden grimness. ‘You belong to me now. We reached that agreement at some point in the early hours of this morning when we both knew what fools we had been.’
So, he was angry. She’d suspected as much by now—though she had expected the opposite response to it. ‘Do you have any appointments today, or are you working from here?’
As a change of subject, she was rather pleased with the smooth way she did it—considering the butterflies going mad in her stomach. She even managed to pour the juice into the glass without spilling any of it onto the worktop.
‘We are taking a day off,’ he announced. ‘So we can move your things in here.’
She put the juice carton down, and picked up the glass, aware that his angry eyes were still following every single thing she did as if he expected her to make a sudden run for it, and was not going to be caught napping when she did. ‘I am not moving in here with you,’ she told him quietly.
‘After that we will do something really domestic, like supermarket shopping for provisions,’ he went on as if she hadn’t spoken.
‘You can do that just as easily over the Internet these days,’ she told him.
‘Then there are a few things this place needs to make it more—homely,’ he persisted unrelentingly. ‘Like a television set and a decent music centre, and some cushions or something to make that soulless sitting room more inviting to relax in. And if you tell me that those can be ordered over the Internet,’ he added with a silken snap, ‘then I will probably have to stand up and come over there, and show you a few things that most certainly cannot!’
‘Why are you so angry, for goodness’ sake?’ she turned to throw at him bewilderedly. ‘You should be pleased I’m not keeping you to what you said last night…’
A Sicilian Seduction Page 11