by Lynne Graham
What hurt the most was Cesare’s belief that she was capable of flitting from his bed into Steve’s. It was a savage irony that she had never been very attracted to Steve. She had liked him, laughed with him and enjoyed his company but the day Steve not unnaturally demanded a little more intimacy from the girl he loved had been the same day that Mina had finally accepted that she didn’t love him in the same way that he loved her. If it hadn’t been for Roger and Winona, her relationship with Steve would have died years sooner than it actually had. The pressure to make the happy twosome into an even happier foursome had been intense.
How could Cesare even think that she had casually shared those same intimacies with another man? Making love was so…so intensely personal. Or at least it had been on Mina’s side. But then she loved Cesare. He did not love her. Love made a difference, she decided wretchedly. What was special to her was not that special to him. Presumably, he had not been celibate for the past four years. As soon as that thought occurred to her she buried it again because it hurt terribly to think of him in another woman’s arms, and after what he had done to her tonight that vulnerability made her loathe herself.
Face it, she told herself painfully, in Cesare’s eyes, you’re a tramp. Why? He got you into bed the first time he kissed you, came back four years later, and within twenty-four hours, in spite of every insult, threat and accusation, you succumbed a second time. No wonder he thinks you’re easy; no wonder he doesn’t respect you; no wonder he seems to think you’re the next best thing to a raving nymphomaniac.
Hadn’t she behaved like one? Admittedly she had been a late starter at twenty-two, but Cesare appeared to believe that one night with him had turned her into a maneater, which was painfully ironic when he was the only man alive who brought out that wanton side of her nature. Shamefacedly, Mina surveyed the barricaded door. Was it to keep him out or to prevent her from surrendering to temptation?
A sound that she instinctively recognised as that of a door opening jerked her head round in search of the source of such an impossibility. She flew up into a sitting position, her heartbeat racing madly as she incredulously surveyed a section of the dark wall-panelling swinging out.
For a split-second she was frozen until she recalled her own nudity. In horror, a stifled gasp of sheer fright escaping her, she grabbed frantically at the silky spread beneath her, clawing the folds up and over her as best she could. ‘Dear God…’ she began weakly.
Cesare appeared in the dark mouth of a doorway which she had not even suspected existed. Clad only in a short black silk robe, he stood there for a timeless moment, undeniably enthralled by the picture Mina made, her golden hair tumbling round her hectically flushed face, violet eyes gleaming as bright as jewels, her slender body scantily wrapped in the rainbow hues of the bedspread.
Colliding with that smouldering golden gaze, Mina went rigid. ‘You rat!’ she suddenly exploded. ‘There was a secret door!’
‘A secret what?’ Cesare breathed, ebony brows drawing together as he frowned at her with what she considered to be a spurious air of incomprehension.
‘Nothing like hedging your bets!’ Mina condemned furiously, fit to be tied at having being surprised in such a situation, curled up on the bed stark naked behind a ridiculously barricaded door when all the time all he had had to do was walk through another door!
‘What are you talking about?’ With visible difficulty, Cesare trailed his hot gaze from her and closed the door behind him. ‘A secret door?’ he queried, his hand lingering for an expressive moment on the wooden handle which a closer scrutiny of the panelled wall would have revealed. ‘What is secret about it? It links our bedrooms.’
‘I don’t want a link between our bedrooms!’ Mina shot at him angrily. ‘Get out!’
But Cesare’s attention had strayed, not surprisingly, to the furniture blocking the other entrance to the bedroom. For a full five seconds he simply stared and then he threw back his dark head and roared with laughter. ‘You put up barricades?’ he questioned with incredulous amusement.
Mina froze into a small graven image as unamused as Queen Victoria might have been but her cheeks burned hotter than ever. Never in her life had she felt more ridiculous.
‘And such large barricades,’ Cesare remarked in a strained voice, flicking the massive chest of drawers a deeply appreciative glance before looking back at her with mocking respect at her achievement. ‘And all that considerable effort wasted, it would seem…I do hope you haven’t exhausted yourself.’
Mina unfroze and clawed up more of the bedspread. ‘Get out of here, Cesare!’
‘But this is our wedding night, cara.’
Mina’s teeth clenched. She wanted to leap off the bed and thump him but she was afraid that the bedspread would fall off. ‘The answer is no!’
A winged ebony brow elevated. ‘Did I ask a question?’
‘You need it spelt out to you?’ Mina intoned, quivering with fury. ‘OK. I am not prepared to share a bed with a man who thinks I’m a gold-digging, dishonest tramp!’
‘Why not?’ Cesare enquired softly. ‘If I’m prepared to sacrifice my principles——’
‘Yours?’ Mina flared in disbelief.
‘Who else’s? If I could keep my hands off you, don’t you think I would?’ Cesare murmured with grim satire. ‘Do you really think that it was my secret ambition to take a wife who could be described as a gold-digging, dishonest tramp?’
‘How dare you?’ Mina spat.
‘You brought the subject up first, and, if you want the reality to extend to the bedroom, so be it,’ Cesare decreed with ruthless bite, a hard, purposeful twist to his expressive mouth. ‘But know it now and accept it—you are going to change. Sooner or later you will tire of hiding behind your pathetic lies and you will tell the truth about what you did four years ago——’
‘I didn’t bloody well do anything!’ Mina screamed at him in a tempestuous surge of fury. ‘And if you fondly imagine that I’m going to hang my head in shame over something I didn’t do——’
‘No remorse…no forgiveness.’ Brilliant golden eyes rested on her with incipient threat. ‘Don’t say you weren’t warned.’
‘You are out of your mind,’ Mina whispered, helplessly intimidated. ‘I did nothing——’
‘You betrayed my trust,’ Cesare condemned, a dark anger shimmering suddenly into the heavy atmosphere. ‘You betrayed me.’
And nothing else mattered, she registered, a sudden chill enclosing her flesh.
‘And you did it with such panache. You told me you loved me,’ Cesare murmured in a tone so quiet that goose-bumps prickled over her exposed skin.
Mina had turned very pale. Painful chagrin was surging through her in waves. She did not want to be reminded of how naïve she had been then, swept off to bed one night and spilling out her heart like an infatuated adolescent who lacked all adult reserve.
‘And I actually believed you,’ Cesare completed with sudden rawness.
‘No doubt it gave you quite a kick,’ Mina condemned jerkily.
‘Not half as much of a kick as keeping you here for my personal entertainment will give me.’ In one unhurried movement, Cesare loosened the tie at his lean waist and shed the robe.
Mina took one staggered glance at the savage potency of his powerful sun-darkened physique and something clenched hard deep in the pit of her stomach, her skin dampening in a tide of treacherous awareness so strong that it left her weak and trembling.
She squeezed her eyes shut in rebellion, frantically fighting the raw sexual charge fingering flames of dangerous fire into an already combustible atmosphere. She would not allow him to do this to her again, she swore to herself. She would control this madness which took no account of anything but the physical, which wiped out every thought and deed. She owed that to herself.
The bed gave slightly with his weight. Mina mentally braced herself for his first touch but it didn’t come. The silence rushed and surged around her with suffocating intensity. When sh
e couldn’t stand the suspense any longer, her lashes lifted.
Cesare was lying in a careless sprawl beside her, looking up at her with eyes of shimmering gold that burned. Her breath shortened in her throat.
‘You know why I gave you that job?’ he murmured conversationally. ‘You were the best candidate and I made a conscious effort not to be sexist. I told myself that the fact that I found you attractive should not interfere with my assessment of your abilities. It was, in short my problem…but within days I sensed that my problem was developing into our problem. You wanted me too——’
‘Not that soon…no, I didn’t!’ she protested.
Cesare lifted an indolent brown hand and pressed a forefinger against her strained mouth in reproof as she automatically bent over him. ‘And you couldn’t hide it. On that level I could read you like a billboard.’
Her lips moved tremulously against his finger, a tiny little quiver of unbelievable tension shrilling through every nerve-ending. ‘No…’
‘But I fought the good fight of restraint on your behalf. I was a complete gentleman.’ A bitter curve slanted his hard mouth as he gazed up at her, electrifying golden eyes sentencing her to stillness. ‘No way was I going to take you abroad with me—too many late nights…too much intimacy…’
‘Too many other women,’ Mina filled in tightly.
‘Diversions which failed.’
‘You wanted me to resign,’ she whispered.
‘You were distracting me.’ Cesare rubbed his fingertip gently across the soft fullness of her lower lip. ‘I had incredible fantasies about you. Long before I ever touched you, I had had you a thousand times in my dreams.’
Her breath hung suspended, her cheeks hotly flushed, but she couldn’t tear her mesmerised gaze from his because he was giving her a glimpse of another world, his world, but it was an infinitely more physical one than hers had been. A spasm of pain pierced her. He talked about sex, nothing else…but then Cesare was one very sexy man.
‘Restraint started out exciting and became deeply painful,’ he muttered with feeling. ‘You bent over a desk and showed me a mere inch of thigh and I burned and I ached like a teenager craving his first score…any time, any place—it didn’t matter. The longer you stayed, the deeper I got in, the harder I had to fight, until it got to the stage where you were the only thing on my mind. It pushed me to the edge…That last week, your time was up…’
Entirely focused on him, she felt light-headed. ‘I didn’t know——’
‘Didn’t know what?’ Cesare whispered unevenly, dropping his hand to the bedspread wrapped beneath her arms as he coiled fluidly up so that their eyes locked. ‘That wanting like that is rare? That most people go all their lives without ever feeling like this? It’s a hunger so strong it has to be satisfied…and it’s bound to rage out of control.’
She recognised an incredibly sensitised awareness of her every sense. A deep languor enclosed her limbs. Silence like a pulsebeat thundered in her eardrums. Without even understanding how it had happened, she was pitched on an electrifying high of anticipation. Reason attempted to stir in the darkness of her mind as she collided dry-mouthed with eyes of molten gold but reason wasn’t powerful enough to still the mad race of her pulses or the accelerated thump of her heart as her breasts swelled and her nipples stiffened into tight little buds.
Lean fingers loosened the silken barrier, tugged it slowly down. Her breath rattled in her throat, stirring her breasts as he bared them. The knowledge that he couldn’t take his eyes off her was terrifyingly exciting. His strong face was dark, intent as he closed his hands round her forearms, pulled her down on top of him and almost simultaneously bent her back, engulfing a pouting pink nipple with the hungry heat of his mouth.
She gasped under the shock wave of sensation that tore through every nerve-ending, her fingers biting into a broad shoulder, then spearing into the dark depths of his hair, and the thought that this was not supposed to be happening came to her again. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut, a sob locking her vocal cords. Never in all her life had she ever wanted anything as badly as she wanted him at that moment. Her body greedily craved the passion but her heart craved the physical closeness, the freedom to touch, to express in silence the need and love she dared not express in words. It was like being torn in two…
One hand anchoring into her tumbling silky hair, he brought her head up. ‘Four years ago I told myself it was only chemistry, only an accidental explosion, but no other woman makes me feel like this,’ he breathed raggedly.
‘But you don’t——’ And all that she could not bring herself to say darkened her anguished eyes. You don’t love me, you don’t like me, you don’t respect me. And the awareness that she would have settled for any one of the three tortured her. ‘There has to be more,’ she muttered shakily. ‘For me, there has to be more…’
His hand moved expertly against her breast, making her tauten and jerk, live-wire sensation turning her very bones to melting honey. ‘You’ll have to do what I do…settle for what you can have; forget about the rest,’ he delivered harshly.
‘But I want——’
‘This…this is what you want!’ Without warning, he took her mouth in a raw surge of dominating passion and the world blacked out, plunging her into the hot darkness beckoning behind her lowered eyelids.
His tongue plunged between her lips, seeking out the tender interior beyond, and she trembled violently as he forced her closer, deftly parting her thighs so that she knelt astride him. A gasp of shock escaped her at the sudden crashing intimacy of her position and she stiffened but, with an unashamed groan of intense satisfaction, Cesare prevented her retreat, powerful hands curving to the swell of her hips as he ravished her mouth with an urgent hunger then ripped away the last lingering remnant of her control.
With one kiss, he made her burn hotter than hellfire. It was like being consumed. Her swollen breasts were crushed against him, the hair roughening his broad chest abrading her sensitive nipples. Every part of her was connected to the hot, hard heat of him, and when he moved, letting her feel the thrusting readiness of his manhood against the very heart of her, she moaned with excitement, so far beyond control that he was the only stable entity she could cling to.
‘This is what we have,’ Cesare muttered thickly, holding her steady with long fingers knotted into her hair, tugging her head back so that he could look at her face. ‘Don’t tell me it’s not enough. Dio…three weeks without touching you! I punish you, I punish myself. Does that please you?’
‘No…’ she mumbled, drowning in his smouldering golden eyes.
He leant over her, nibbled erotically at the reddened fullness of her lower lip, and as she trembled, he uttered a strangled groan and shuddered, every muscle tautening with whipcord tension as he lifted her against him, searching out the moist heat between her thighs. She writhed, cried out, unbearable sensation rising to a sudden shattering peak that was pure torment.
‘I can’t wait.’ He brought her down to him with aching slowness and agonising control, forging his entry little by little, and it was so staggeringly exciting that she somehow wanted to faint with delight and scream with frustration at the same time. She closed her eyes, instinctively attempting to conceal the wildness of her own desperate hunger.
‘Look at me,’ Cesare demanded, stilling.
‘Don’t stop!’ she gasped between clenched teeth.
‘Open your eyes,’ he grated. Her lashes flew up, revealing her puzzlement.
‘I want to watch you…I want to be sure you know it’s me inside you,’ he rasped with sizzling bite, his lean features taut with intense sexual arousal and equally intense determination.
She was far beyond reasoning. Quivering with out-of-control response to what he was making her feel, she looked blankly back at him. ‘Cesare…?’
‘Sí…Cesare…nobody else…ever again,’ he spelt out between gritted teeth, perspiration dampening his golden skin. And with riveting abruptness he withdrew from he
r and flipped her backwards across the tumbled bedspread, coming down on top of her in one fluid movement, pinning her startled hands to the mattress and thrusting into her yielding flesh with driving force. Later she would remember it as the most intensely erotic shock he had ever given her. She was stunned and then stunned again by a wave of sheer blinding excitement.
He took her by storm and she felt possessed, driven, inflamed by the feeling that he was out of control. All honeyed pliancy and complicity, every fibre of her body pitched to an unbelievable height of anticipation, she let herself go, lost herself entirely in the thunder of her own crazed heartbeat and the fevered tension coiling ever tighter inside her. With every driving thrust he took her higher, and then suddenly the whole world went multi-coloured, her back arching, her teeth clenching as she sobbed, ‘I love you…I love you!’ on the peak of a shuddering and ecstatic wave of drowning pleasure.
Clawing back up through the layers of indolent languor which enclosed her, Mina noticed the silence first. It vibrated. Cesare freed himself from the tangle of their damp limbs and slid on to his side, releasing her from his weight, letting cooler air wash over her hot skin.
‘Don’t feed me bull like that again,’ he murmured with lancing derision.
With an uncertain hand she reached for the bedspread but it was too tangled to offer her any speedy hope of a covering. Hearing that tone from him in the aftermath of his passion was like having a knife plunged into her heart. It made her want to curl up and die. It negated the pleasure and, worse, it made her wanton craving of that same pleasure seem a shameful and weak self-betrayal.