by Lynne Graham
She needed her passport and her money. No doubt she would eventually get home without the passport but it would be a lot easier if she could simply step right on to the first available flight. Afraid to turn on the desk lamp in case someone saw it shining out into the courtyard, she had to make do with the moonlight.
Her passport would be in his desk. It was the obvious place. She rummaged frantically through the drawers, only one of which was locked and that she left to the last. Biting her lip in frustration, she looked round for a suitable weapon to employ. She swooped on a paper knife and tried, nervous perspiration beading her brow, to force the lock. The knife scraped incredibly loudly across the wood when she failed.
It was an antique desk, built to last. She hacked with increasing desperation at the recalcitrant drawer, her nervous tension escalating by the minute. Finally, she acknowledged defeat. May you rot in hell, Angelo, she thought furiously. The window was not locked and it opened with the minimum of noise. She was halfway over the sill when she remembered the necklace.
With a curse, she wrenched at it and all but strangled herself! Using both hands, she attempted to pull it into breaking without lacerating her own throat. It was a considerably more difficult feat than she had imagined. Her neck bruised and sore, she gave up, and all the time her rage was building even higher. Hacking at Angelo’s desk had made her feel like a criminal. She slid the rest of the way out the window and hurried across to the Porsche.
Angelo hadn’t got all of her money. She had had some tucked for emergencies in her case. It would be sufficient to cover petrol if she needed any, at least one night’s accommodation somewhere and telephone calls to arrange sufficient funds to travel home on. She would abandon the car in Pisa and head for the tourist office to ask what she had to do about her ‘lost’ passport.
Taking a deep breath, she started up the Porsche. It fired with a low growl and she filtered it slowly down towards the gates. Damn, they were shut! Leaping out, she opened them, dived back into the car and took off down the hill like a bullet.
Kelda was a confident driver but she had no map. She had driven quite a few miles before she came on a small town. There she slowed down in search of a signpost. A car came up close behind her and flashed its lights. Ignorant pig, she thought, so I’m not going fast enough! When a police siren went off, that same car overtook her at speed and pulled across the road in front of her, forcing her to a halt. She was thunderstruck.
She was arrested. The policeman spoke even less English than she spoke Italian but there were sufficient similarities between the languages for her to grasp with a sinking heart that she was being accused of stealing the car. Dear God, Angelo had reported the Porsche stolen! Her inability to produce her passport only exacerbated the situation.
Within half an hour, Kelda was in a police cell. It was a small town, an even smaller station and it was the middle of the night. Clearly there was nobody available to question her in English.
‘Domani...’ the policeman said in receipt of her shattered protests. Tomorrow. Tomorrow, it would be sorted out.
Kelda was in a blind panic by then. It had finally dawned on her that she had stolen Angelo’s Porsche and that if he wanted to proceed with such a charge, he was probably well within his rights. She curled up on a bed with all the comfort of a funeral slab and burst into floods of tears. She was terrified. How was she going to explain what she had done?
It was dawn when the cell door was unlocked and she was taken into what appeared to be an interview room. The policeman went out again and reappeared with Angelo.
Kelda took one paralysed look at him, flew out of her chair and threw herself at him. ‘Angelo, get me out of here...please!’ she sobbed.
He went rigid for a split second and then he closed his arms round her and said something in his own language to the policeman. Somebody else started talking. She took a deep shuddering breath and fought for self-control but she really was at the end of her tether.
Angelo guided her back out to the Porsche. ‘How the hell could you be so stupid?’ he raked at her as he pushed her into the passenger seat.
‘How could you report your car stolen?’ she gasped strickenly. ‘How could you do that to me?’
Angelo drove off at a mercilessly controlled speed. His profile was set like granite, tension emanating from him in waves. ‘I did not report my car stolen. Stella saw it being driven off and got one of the maids to ring the police immediately. As it happens,’ he shared with grating emphasis, ‘they were already on their way. When you climbed out of the window of my study, you activated an alarm at the police station—’
‘An alarm?’ she echoed.
‘A highly sophisticated security system installed to repel intruders,’ Angelo spelt out fiercely. ‘If it’s activated and I don’t call to say it was a mistake, naturally the police take it seriously. By the time I got out of bed, they were on the doorstep. When I saw the open window and the mess you’ve made of my desk, it did not instantly occur to me that you were the culprit—’
‘Well, it should have done!’ she raged at him with a sob tearing at her shaking voice.
‘Do forgive me if I am not accustomed to a guest under my roof sneaking out of a window in the middle of the night and stealing my car!’ Angelo flashed back at her with savage impatience.
‘I was not stealing your car...I was b-borrowing it!’ she blistered back hotly.
‘You took my car without permission.’
‘Oh, shut up about your bloody car!’ Kelda shrieked at him. ‘You took my passport and my money away! I was a prisoner! Of course I tried to escape...I’ll never forgive you for what you’ve done to me tonight! Do you hear me?’
‘Sta zitto!’ Angelo bit out wrathfully.
‘No, I will not keep quiet. Why sh-should I?’ she sobbed furiously at him. ‘I was locked up like a common criminal—’
‘You were arrested because you were driving a car that had been reported stolen. It was a misunderstanding and you are fortunate that the police, who drove me here to pick you up, were willing to be so helpful. You could have been locked up for the rest of the night.’
‘I hate you so much I could kill you,’ Kelda threw at him bitterly. ‘What did you tell the police?’
‘That we had had a lovers’ tiff,’ Angelo drawled silkily as he filtered the car to a halt in the courtyard. ‘What else? Italian men understand and appreciate women of volatile temperament.’
‘I hate you,’ she said again, unable to think of anything more vicious to say in the state she was in.
‘Say that just one more time,’ Angelo bit out in a sizzling undertone across the bonnet of the Porsche.
‘And you’ll what?’ she shouted back with seething contempt as she strode into the house. ‘I hate you...I hate you...I hate you!’
A powerful hand caught her wrist and yanked her round in the hall.
Her teeth grinding together, Kelda collided with incandescent golden eyes. It was like falling on an electric fence. ‘Let go of me!’ she hissed. ‘Or, so help me, I’ll scream the place down!’
‘Go ahead,’ Angelo invited, hauling her roughly up against him. ‘Scream.’
Kelda was in the grip of such fury that she took full advantage of the invitation. In a passion, she threw her head back and screamed so loudly she hurt her throat and choked. She waited in the simmering silence. Nobody came running. Her lashes fluttered in bemusement.
Before she could part her lips again, Angelo literally grabbed her off her feet. One minute she was standing on solid ground, the next she was airborne and on the way up the stairs. ‘Put me down!’ she screeched.
He kicked her bedroom door wide, kicked it shut again and dropped her down on the bed. ‘Angelo—’
‘Shut up.’ He came down on top of her in one lithe movement, pinning her flat with his superior weight. She was in the act of struggling to raise a punitive knee when he brought his mouth down hard on hers.
Still in a fury, she dug her ha
nds like claws into his luxuriant hair and then the passion flooded her in a roaring tidal wave. It came out of nowhere, attacked and took her prisoner. A passion so instantaneous it wiped out everything that had gone before it. Electrified by the raw, devouring heat of his mouth, she was possessed by an excitement so intense that she felt dizzy and disorientated.
Her blood was drumming in her veins, her heart hammering like crazy. She was hot and cold all over and unable to keep still. He delved between her lips with his tongue and her thighs trembled. He kissed her until she was breathless and burning, not a single part of her body untouched by the sheer intensity of her arousal.
He hauled her sweatshirt off with more impatience than finesse, burying his mouth with a muttered imprecation in the sweet valley between her heaving breasts. He struggled out of his shirt. She heard fabric tear and reached instinctively up to bring him back to her again, lacing her arms round his neck, her fingers lacing into his hair in an ecstasy of excitement.
He muttered something in Italian. He sounded shaken, unlike himself. He came back to her again, the black curling hair on his chest abrasive against her taut nipples, thrusting his hands beneath her back to force her into even more intimate contact with his hard, muscular length. A choked sigh of satisfaction escaped her as he crushed her against him. She couldn’t get close enough to him and evidently he couldn’t get close enough to her.
He pressed his mouth to an achingly sensitive pulse at the base of her throat and sensation stormed through her. His hands found the proud swell of her breasts with surprisingly gentle hands and shaped and stroked, deliberately not touching the hardened peaks until her muscles clenched with frustration and she arched her back and helplessly invited him to that deeper intimacy.
And then, with a soft laugh, he captured a taut nipple and laved it with his tongue, teasing with his sharp white teeth before taking the unbearably tender bud into the moist cave of his mouth. It was a sweet torment that drove claws of raw need into her quivering body, and when he employed the same technique on her other breast she began to moan and tremble, utterly possessed by the power of sensation.
He ran the tip of his tongue down over her taut stomach and a rush of heat made her hips jerk. She wanted to drag his mouth back to hers. She wanted him everywhere at once because her whole body was beginning to scream with the hunger he had incited. He skimmed off the remainder of her clothing in one bold movement, rolling on to his side to devour her mouth in a series of rough, deep, drugging kisses while he dispensed with his own.
He came back to her naked. He was hot and damp and very male and she gasped at the power of her own pleasure in the feel of his body against hers. It was so different, so alien and yet, strangely, so gloriously right. Her fingers spread over the satin-smooth skin of his back and he jerked as if she had pulled a string. Moving without warning, he took her swollen mouth in a sudden explosion of renewed passion, holding her down, letting his hand travel over her silky, quivering stomach to the tangle of red curls at the apex of her thighs.
Nothing she had so far experienced prepared her for the wild excitement that overwhelmed her when he explored the moist petals of her femininity. His touch was so exquisitely pleasurable that she cried out. She was on a high of unbearable sensation, twisting, turning, entirely at the mercy of her own needs, but on another level she was highly attuned to the same build-up of excitement in Angelo.
His breathing was fractured, his heartbeat thumping a tattoo beneath her spread fingers. He moved with lithe determination, gripping her thighs and pulling her to him.
‘I have waited so long for this, cara...’ he muttered almost savagely.
A faint feathering of instinctive fear of the unknown momentarily gripped her as she felt the swollen hardness of his manhood against her. But it was shattered by the hunger he had unleashed inside her. That hunger, too long denied, sought only satisfaction at whatever the cost. Yet she was naïvely unprepared for the driving force with which he invaded her body with his own and the sharp pang of pain which momentarily clenched her muscles and made her bite into the soft underside of her lower lip.
Angelo stilled and stared down at her. In the dawn light she could focus on him with clarity. His lustrous golden eyes betrayed a brief glimmer of rare uncertainty and narrowed, suddenly raking her hectically flushed face. ‘I’m hurting you,’ he whispered, not quite steadily.
The pain had gone as quickly as it had come but her untried body had yet to adjust to that most intimate invasion. ‘No.’ The denial was jerky, swift.
‘You’re so small,’ he breathed, sinking his hands beneath her slender hips, lithely shifting between her thighs with a stifled groan of pleasure and splintering control.
She felt possessed then, utterly and completely. He moved on her, slowly, deliberately until all she could focus on was the extraordinary response of her own body. All control was gone. The savage rhythm took a hold of her and she burned up in a heatwave of sensation, crying out at the moment of climax and subsiding into an aftermath of pleasure so intense she almost passed out. Angelo curved both arms round her so tightly she could scarcely breathe, and with a sleepy smile she fell blissfully asleep.
When she woke up, Angelo was making love to her again. The curtains were closed. She didn’t know whether it was day or night. It didn’t matter. She didn’t want to think, only feel. Angelo allowed no time for thought, even less for conversation. It was as though there was nothing but the moment to be lived for. He was ruthless in his single-minded pursuit of pleasure.
‘What time it it?’ she whispered when she opened her eyes again, grudgingly reluctant to obey the rousing hand on her shoulder.
‘After midnight.’ Angelo was dressed and that struck her as extraordinary.
‘Midnight when?’ she muttered gruffly, removing her dazed eyes from him to conceal her consternation.
‘Yesterday you were arrested,’ he filled in obligingly, and settled a laden tray down on the wildly tossed bed.
They had slept and made love through an entire day. It didn’t seem real. She couldn’t believe it had happened. Her...and Angelo. A fight and an explosion of passion that had overruled every intelligent thought.
‘Are you not hungry?’
He looked so cool. That inflamed her. She had to bite at her tongue to silence it before she impulsively spoke her mind. And what could she say? He was lounging on the end of her bed as though he belonged there. His strong jawline was no longer blue-shadowed. His hair was still damp from a shower. He was immaculately clad in an Armani sweater and black designer jeans. He took her breath away. Drop-dead gorgeous and deadly.
Self-preservation uppermost, she reached for the tray. Steak and a Caesar salad.
‘It’s the one meal I can make,’ Angelo drawled with mocking self-deprecation.
‘The only one you can be bothered to make, you mean,’ she translated without hesitation, but inwardly astonished that he should have gone to that amount of effort for anyone other than himself.
‘Why should I cook when I can afford to pay other people to do it?’
Why the blazes were they talking about the contents of her plate? It was impossible that Angelo could be feeling as awkward as she did. Angelo was no stranger to the intimacy of the bedroom. The morning after could hold no discomfiture for a male of his experience. But she refused to show her own desperately seesawing emotions. She chewed every piece of steak at least forty-seven times. As long as she was eating, he couldn’t expect conversation, and all the while she was engaged in coping with the stark reality of the past twenty-four hours.
Why? Why Angelo? How could Angelo make her lose control to this extent when other men, even men she had liked and respected, left her cold? At eighteen, he had awakened her sensuality and she had buried that discovery deep. And whether she liked it or not there were ties between them that until now she had refused to recognise. From thirteen to seventeen, until that final year he’d spent abroad, Angelo had been the dominant male in her life. Sh
e knew Angelo on levels that she took for granted.
She had forgotten nothing in six years. She knew that he could not abide disorder or unpunctuality, she knew that he loved fast cars...and, discreetly, even faster women. She knew that he positively thrived on the pressure of wheeling and dealing on the international money-market. And she knew so many little things too.
His shirts were specially made for him in Hong Kong. She knew what size socks he wore because she had given him socks Christmas after Christmas in lurid colours she was well aware that he would never wear. She knew he had to shave twice a day. She knew he still kept the horse he had loved as a teenager in the ritziest stable in the block. She knew that he had perfect white teeth, had never had a filling but went a whiter shade of pale at the prospect of his six-monthly dental check-up...
And that knowledge made Angelo seem dangerously familiar. But they were only superficial things, she reminded herself painfully. Furthermore, her previous acquaintance with Angelo had been formed when she was a child and he had been an adult, who stood over her in a position of trust. Was it that awareness which had made it so difficult for her to believe that Angelo would actually hurt her? For, if that was true, if that was to be her excuse, she had never been more wrong about anything in her life.
Angelo skated a brown forefinger over the back of her hand. ‘Are you usually this quiet?’
‘Without eight full hours of rest and three regular meals...yes,’ she dismissed and resisted the urge to jerk her hand out of reach.
Pride demanded that she protect herself. Angelo despised her and yet she had gone to bed with him. Not just once either. She had fallen off the bandwagon into an orgy which not the most self-deceiving argument could excuse. Her sexual infatuation had made a victim out of her but it didn’t have to be that way...no, it didn’t, she told herself fierily. She was no man’s victim.