by Lynne Graham
Without understanding, she frowned. ‘What price?’
‘You’re the one who has told me that you are any man’s possession for the right price, and I’m prepared to pay it to have you in my bed,’ Cesare drawled with a positive shudder of unconcealed fury.
Sharply disconcerted by the even less anticipated response he was now making, Mina licked her dry lips. ‘I——’
‘You told me quite deliberately, you shameless…’ With a seething hiss, Cesare clenched his even white teeth and bit back whatever he had been about to call her. ‘You know how much I want you. You just stuck on a pricetag!’
Mina almost choked in an effort to swallow. Cesare had withstood that farrago of gruesome lies about her lover in the country? He might be within a death-defying inch of reaching out and choking the life out of her for her apparent promiscuity and greed but, on the brink of murder or otherwise, he was ready to embark upon financial negotiation for her sexual favours.
Mina had never been more appalled or more shattered. It was not a compliment, but Cesare wanted her that much? He had been so cool, so controlled last night. This afternoon he was neither. She had never seen him out of control before. Involuntarily she was fascinated by the play of vibrant, strong emotions across his rawly handsome features. He was fighting a very close fight between a desire to kill her and a desire to—oh!
A flush of heat prickling across her skin, every muscle tightening, Mina dredged her attention from the explicit sexuality of the all-male gaze roaming hotly over her.
‘I don’t think I’m really your type,’ she muttered weakly, beginning to wonder if she belonged in an asylum.
‘Someday, somehow, perhaps when I have sated this obscene craving for your body, I will take this out on your hide,’ Cesare swore, like someone making a blood oath over a grave. ‘I will punish you for this filthy negotiation that reduces me to the level of an animal!’
Dry-mouthed on the feeling that she had foolishly unleashed a whole lot more than she could handle in that brooding Sicilian temperament, Mina backed to the window, still refusing to look at him, not trusting herself, not trusting him, feeling with every fibre of her body the passion flaming reckless fingers of fire into the atmosphere between them. ‘Cesare…I didn’t mean to——’
‘To think I could have saved myself from this,’ he grated. ‘The first day when you walked into that interview I decided I could not possibly employ a woman whom I wanted to strip and fling onto the nearest bed!’
Helplessly her head flew up. She couldn’t believe her ears.
‘I gave you a nightmare interview…and you took it,’ Cesare condemned with lingering disbelief at such unfeminine strength of will and staying power.
‘You were trying to scare me off?’ Mina questioned in a tone of revelation.
‘I was a fool. I gave you the job.’
Mina’s mouth curved downwards. He had been lusting after her from the start but he hadn’t shown it. He had played a waiting game, doubtless entertaining himself with the prospect of her willing and grateful surrender at the end of his little game. Wham-bam, but not thank you, ma’am.
She had been as naïve as a lamb skipping into the slaughterhouse and she was exceedingly tempted to demand to know why he hadn’t taken precautions. Considering that she had dissolved into mindless joy at his first kiss and he had been the experienced partner, she was still astounded by his reckless disregard for the consequences. Only then did it occur to her, for the very first time, that where Susie was concerned she had absolutely no regrets about that night. She could not imagine life without her daughter.
‘But now, at least, I know the kind of woman I am dealing with!’ Cesare asserted with driven savagery.
Dragged back to the present, she discovered that Cesare was now so close that she could feel the heat of him. Her spine was already in contact with the window behind her. ‘You know nothing about me!’ she protested shakily.
‘You excite me—what else is important?’ he said thickly, regarding her with sizzling intensity from the vantage point of his greatly superior height.
Her breasts were stirring, swelling. A heady languor was sweeping through her limbs, a betraying twist of high-voltage sexual awareness curling low in the pit of her stomach. But she fought every treacherous sensation with all her might, wild colour burnishing her openly dismayed face. ‘You don’t even like me…you called me a thief and a confidence trickster!’ she gasped. ‘How can you still——?’
‘Desire you?’ Cesare filled in, his hands settling down on her narrow shoulders with a pronounced air of finality. ‘Sex is an appetite. If I’m tired, I sleep. If I’m hungry, I eat. If I’m——’
‘Shut up and let go of me!’ Mina was starting to tremble, a terrible fear stirring inside her as she was subjected to the magnetic pull of his smouldering gaze. Her head whirled and her body no longer felt as though it belonged to her. Don’t you dare touch me——’
‘You’re scared of this…’ With a blunt forefinger he traced the scooped neckline of her summer dress, his touch so light that it whispered across her skin, but it left a trail of fire in its wake, made her breath catch in her throat, made the blood in her veins pound in insane acceleration. ‘Now isn’t that an interesting discovery?’ he murmured in a satisfied purr. ‘You’ve got an Achilles’ heel after all, cara. That steel trap of a brain can’t control what I make you feel and naturally that scares you.’
‘Don’t——’
‘Don’t what?’ In an indolently smooth movement, Cesare dropped his hands to the swell of her hips and swept her up into his arms, a primitive blaze of triumph firing his lancing gaze. ‘Don’t touch you because you’re afraid I might realise how desperate you are for my caresses? Don’t touch you because you might give yourself to me for nothing?’ He flung back his dark head and laughed with hard satisfaction. ‘And you will. With me, there will be no price!’
‘Put me down!’ she shrieked, a spasm of rage taking hold of her, breaking through the erotic spell he cast.
He kissed her. He kissed her until her heartbeat was a crashing thunderclap inside her ribcage. She fought the hunger he was inciting, wild with fear that he was right and she could not control her own treacherously susceptible body. But he kept on kissing her with a wild hot passion that bruised her soft lips against her teeth and suddenly, as he sent his tongue in a delving foray into the tender interior she had attempted to deny him, she was jolted by an uncontrollable surge of need that clawed cruelly at her, making her moan like a trapped animal in pain.
Her head was swimming with dizziness when he let her come up for air. She was as weak as an accident victim, quivering with shock. She was lying across his lap on her bed. Long brown fingers, dark against her pale skin, were engaged in flipping loose the pearlised buttons on the bodice of her dress. In horror at the sight, she clasped a small hand to his in an effort to stop him.
‘No!’ she gasped, stricken.
‘You’re mine,’ Cesare muttered thickly, one strong arm closing fiercely round her to stress the assurance, and he simply shifted his hand smoothly from beneath hers and slid it beneath the parted edges of her bodice, slowly curving his fingers over the firm thrust of one unbound breast.
It had been so long since she had known such intimacy that her teeth clenched on the sweet pleasurepain of her own helpless excitement, and in the interim her hand fell away. He tugged the dress open, exposing the smooth pale flesh he sought, discovering the delectable curves she had tried to conceal. With an unashamed groan of hunger he caressed a pouting pink nipple with almost worshipping fingers, watching the bud bloom into aching prominence.
Her eyes were closed. ‘No…no,’ she mumbled, lying back against his arm, struggling madly to control the electrifying response shooting through her in debilitating waves.
‘Exquisite…Your body remembers me even if that mercenary little heart doesn’t want to,’ Cesare murmured, his breath fanning her cheek and his fingers playing with her unbearably se
nsitised breasts with erotic mastery.
A throbbing pulsebeat of terrifying hunger was controlling her now. Her mind was a desert, a wasteland, empty of every thought. Her entire being was centred on a knife-edge of anticipation. As the moist heat of his mouth engulfed a tender pink nipple, she gasped as though he had thrown an overload switch, lost to everything but what he could make her feel. With every sure caress, she was sucked deeper into a whirlpool of passion, seduced by her own desperate hunger.
On some other level she was aware of the cooler air that brushed her skin as her dress fell away entirely and then he was laying her flat, crushing her mouth under his with raw, unashamed hunger. Her hands swept over his silk-clad back in sudden frustration, instinctively seeking the satin-smooth skin she remembered. His muscles rippled as he tautened and broke the connection of their mouths.
Her glazed eyes opened on that shock of separation. He was ripping off his shirt, and she remembered that from before, but she heard no warning bells. Past and present had merged indistinguishably. The pectoral muscles of his lean, golden torso were hazed with a sprinkling of ebony curls. Like someone in an hypnotic trance, she focused on the blazing gold of his eyes and sank ever deeper into his power.
‘You are so beautiful,’ he muttered, his accent roughening every syllable.
She wanted to return the compliment but she couldn’t find her voice. She lifted a hand slowly and spread it against the warm wall of his chest, mesmerised by the power of her own craving and the thunder of his heartbeat below her palm. He bent his dark head, ran the tip of his tongue sensually along the full swell of her lower lip and came down beside her again.
‘Cesare…’ It was a whisper of surrender so complete that she melted to liquid honey making it.
He found her reddened mouth tremulously open in welcome and responded to the invitation with a savage drugging intensity which overwhelmed her. Her fingers smoothed through his silky hair, tracing his well-shaped head, joy singing through her veins. In one impatient movement his hand closed round the band of fabric at her narrow hips and wrenched it out of his path, tugging up her knees to facilitate the operation.
She shivered violently and twisted under the onslaught of his mouth as he parted her thighs and explored the hot, moist centre of her. Deep in her throat she emitted a low cry, gripped by an intolerable pleasure that made her burn and quiver and shamelessly crave more. With a raw groan of excitement that more than matched hers, Cesare knelt over her, ravishing her soft mouth one more time as if he was stamping her as his possession.
He pulled her to him with strong hands and instantaneously attempted to sink into her with one powerful thrust. There was a flash of momentary pain that made her bite down on her tongue and taste blood. Cesare muttered something in Italian, settled his hands on her hips and drove into her again, making her tender flesh yield more fully, and the sensation was so unbearably pleasurable that she moaned in shock and delight, for she had worked so hard at forgetting, had made herself forget, that most intimate moment.
But Cesare was inside her again in the place that was his alone, and she wrapped her arms tightly round him in acceptance and welcome, letting him teach her that primitive rhythm again as he moved with a raw power that dominated and drove, allowing her no surcease from the crazed spiral of excitement controlling her. She hit that promised peak of glory in an astounded sunburst of pleasure that tore her apart as she jerked mindlessly beneath the waves of climactic release, crying out his name with tears of ecstasy in her eyes.
Cesare came down on her, nearly crushing what life remained from her, and then swiftly slid on to his side in the confined space, with one arm clamping her back to his hot, damp body. Her cheek rested against a smooth brown shoulder and her nostrils flared on the warm, aromatic maleness of him. She was in a state not a hair’s breadth from heavenly bliss and there still wasn’t a single atom of activity in her brain.
His hand splayed across her lower stomach and then stilled, explored the fine seam of the scar he had come upon. ‘What caused that?’ he asked with sudden tension.
Mina’s brain switched back on, all systems on red alert. Cesare was already flipping her over, evidently intent on examining the imperfection visually. But before she could attempt to snatch up something with which to cover a nudity that without warning now struck her as appalling he had achieved his objective.
Cesare had turned pale at one glimpse of her Caesarean scar. ‘You’ve had surgery,’ he breathed as she sat bolt upright, grabbed clumsily at her discarded dress and concealed herself behind it as best she could. ‘Major surgery——’
‘No, only a little female thing,’ Mina lied in desperation, evading his shocked gaze. ‘It looks much worse than it is.’
‘What was the matter with you?’ he demanded tautly.
‘I told you, something female and private—minor.’
‘It doesn’t look minor——’
‘But it is and I’m sorry you find it so offensive,’ she said wildly, ready to say or do anything to throw him off the subject.
‘Of course I don’t find it offensive but naturally I was disturbed,’ Cesare asserted stiffly, ‘and if that is the result of some minor female problem you must have had a third-rate surgeon!’
As he sprang off the bed, entirely unconcerned by his lack of clothing, Mina made no response. She was remembering the day of Susie’s birth. The long labour that had eventually led to the necessity of a Caesarean section. What she remembered most clearly was the terrible sense of aloneness that day and the days which had followed before she was released from hospital. All the other women in the ward had had husbands or boyfriends, but she had only had Roger and Winona during all those endless open visiting hours and she had been so mortified by the sympathy of some of those women that she had chosen to kill Cesare off sooner than admit that her baby was the result of a one-night stand with a man who hadn’t even wanted to lay eyes on her after it.
Yet even after that experience here she was again in a bed which Cesare had put her in. It was a devastating return to reality, plunging her down into a well of stark shame. Abruptly, seeking only to hide herself, she wrenched back the quilt and slid under it, turning on her stomach, burying her burning face in the pillow. She had betrayed herself. And she had no excuses to make in her own defence.
Four years ago she had loved Cesare and had mistakenly assumed that when he’d reached for her that night he’d wanted something more than sex. But she had found out the hard way that passion could give a dangerous illusion of intimacy. In her ignorance, she had read more into his behaviour than was there. This time, her savaged pride could fall back on no such misinterpretation.
A fiery desire drew them together, but in the aftermath they were separate again. Cesare despised her. Cesare had so low an opinion of her morals that he had swallowed whole all that nonsense she had spouted about having a weekend lover. It didn’t really matter to him. All his ego had required was the humiliating surrender he could drag from her at will. He had told her that he would use her as once he believed she had dared to use him…and she had actually allowed him to do it!
How could she respond so wildly to a man she hated? What madness was in her that she could be guilty of such self-destructive behaviour? Four years ago, it had taken her months to rise above the conviction that she had been stupid and cheap and shameless. How long would it take this time? How could she live with the knowledge that in Cesare’s radius she was every one of those three things? How could she live with the knowledge that when Cesare chose to reach out an arrogant hand to her she was his for the taking? Pain stabbed into her, sharp as a knife.
‘I’ve changed my mind about you living with me,’ Cesare imparted with flat emphasis into the thundering silence.
Hardly surprising, she reflected with a cringing shudder. He had already taken what he wanted and it had cost him the bare minimum of effort. Only an idiot would now go to the unnecessary inconvenience of moving her below the same roof! Seduction,
soft lights and music or whatever had not been required. Just like the last time, Cesare had slaked his sexual hunger without any of the frills which other women probably took for granted. She took a masochistic satisfaction from lashing those unpleasant truths home to herself.
‘Being waited on hand and foot by servants in luxurious surroundings would merely teach you all over again that you can get what you want out of life by using sex as a currency,’ Cesare delivered, as if he were handing down a judgement from on high to the condemned scarlet woman about to be dragged out and whipped for the sin of being sexually available.
‘I want you to leave,’ a muffled voice said from the pillow. She wanted him to go before she started tearing her hair out and sobbing uncontrollably. It was her lowest hour.
‘When you can establish to my satisfaction that every penny of that money is now gone, I will be prepared to assist you to move somewhere a little less like a hovel,’ Cesare drawled coldly. ‘But I am not going to keep you. You’ll have to find work, some form of respectable employment where you will not be tempted by the opportunity to make money by deception.’
Stunned as all that sank in, Mina emerged from the pillow and encountered winter-dark eyes sharp as lasers. ‘Doing what?’ she probed in a wobbly voice of disbelief. ‘Scrubbing floors?’
Cesare studied her with glittering cool. ‘I don’t care what you do as long as it’s honest.’
‘The reform package.’ Hysteria clogged up her working throat. She struggled to keep it in but the mindless giggles tearing at her couldn’t be restrained and spilt out, shattering the heavy silence.
With a vicious curse in his own language, Cesare came down on the edge of the bed and closed hard hands over her shoulders. ‘Stop it!’ he hissed.
‘C-can’t help it!’ she gasped, but her overtaxed emotions somehow screamed to a frozen halt when she collided with the blaze of anger in his golden eyes.