by Lynne Graham
Sergio was infinitely more at ease with the ambience. With infinite cool and casualness, he laced his fingers with hers and walked her up the stairs. ‘I am not really familiar with shy women—’
‘I’ve never been shy in my life!’ Kathy objected, kicking off her shoes there and then on the landing as if she was making a statement.
‘Except with me.’ Unimpressed by her claim, Sergio lowered his arrogant dark head and let his expert mouth travel a sensual path from her ear lobe to the extended length of her neck and the tiny pulse beating like mad at the centre of her delicate collar-bone. ‘And it’s okay. I find it unbelievably sexy, delizia mia.’
The master bedroom suite was set behind huge double doors and on the same massive scale as everything in the palazzo. Kathy took one look at the gilded four-poster bed and scrambled onto it, bouncing back against the heaped pillows with an ecstatic whoop of appreciation. ‘Oh, that’s amazing—I’ve always wanted a bed like this!’
‘And although I almost didn’t recognise it until it was too late, I always wanted a girl like you in it,’ Sergio informed her huskily.
Her ready smile lurched a little and she was quick to lower her lashes to conceal her expression, as she knew that someone like her could not aspire to dream-girl status. She was so different from Grazia in looks, style and experience. As Grazia had cruelly pointed out, she would always be the girl he had idolised as a teenager. There was a history there, a pull of familiarity, background and youthful attachment that Kathy knew she could never hope to equal.
Sergio sank down beside her and undid the clasp of her emerald and pearl necklace, setting it aside before embarking on the tiny hooks on her fitted bodice. Her narrow spine tensed because she was thinking about the moment when he would see the scar on her back. ‘That’s okay…I can manage!’ she said hurriedly, wriggling out of reach with the dexterity of an eel.
Sergio tugged her back to him. ‘How did it happen?’
The level of his insight unnerved her and her delicate profile tightened. ‘In prison. Someone thought I’d grassed them up and jumped me in the showers.’
He closed his arms round her. ‘Nobody will ever harm you again.’
‘You can’t make promises like that.’ Her eyes were hot and scratchy with tears but she wouldn’t give way to her emotions. Being absolutely crazy about him was one thing, even dropping a hint of it something else entirely.
Sergio turned her round to look at him. ‘You are so terrified of trusting me—’
Her apple-green eyes flashed. ‘I’m not terrified of anything!’
Dark golden eyes smouldering, he leant forward and drove her soft lips apart with the passionate demand of his sensual mouth. After so long the taste of him chased through her like a chain reaction. Heat uncoiled in her pelvis while the rest of her turned to jelly. Angling his proud dark head back, he sprang up to peel off his shirt. Her heart thudded while she watched him undress. Light caught the wedding ring on his finger. The reminder that he was her husband was welcome and it strengthened her again.
She slid off the bed in a fluid movement and turned round. ‘I need your help to get out of this…’ she said gruffly.
He ran down the zip on the fitted skirt and it dropped to her feet. She stepped out of it. He shifted her hair round her slim white shoulders and touched his lips to a sensual pulse point at the vulnerable nape of her neck. ‘You’re trembling…’
‘It’s been a long time,’ she said breathlessly.
‘How long?’ His question was abrupt and a sharp little silence fell. ‘I did wonder if—’
‘Don’t go there. It’s none of your business,’ Kathy interposed waspishly. ‘Did I ask you for chapter and verse on what you did on your stupid flashy boat?’
‘I offered and you refused to listen. Tell me, if I sank Diva Queen, would you stop going on about the stag do?’ Sergio enquired dulcetly.
Kathy giggled. ‘No, I’d tell you how extravagant and wasteful you were, and I still wouldn’t forget.’
He let the boned bodice fall and an almost inaudible gasp escaped her when she realised that the jagged seam of her scar was visible. ‘You have skin like satin, all soft and silky and white as snow,’ he murmured with silken intimacy. ‘Your hair looks like flame against it and I can’t believe you’re so anxious about one small imperfection…’ He smoothed over the roughened skin and she shivered, narrow shoulder blades protruding defensively.
‘It’s ugly,’ she pointed out. ‘And my skin is so pale it really shows.’
‘The only ugliness is in the person who did this to you,’ Sergio asserted. ‘If it bothers you so much that you feel you have to hide it, a good plastic surgeon could probably make it vanish. But as far as I’m concerned, it’s nothing, bella mia.’
‘You’re quite good at saying the right thing when you have to,’ Kathy teased, all her tension evaporating, her spine curving as she leant back against him. ‘So, no doubt if you put your mind to it, you can be equally good at being married.’
‘Is that an order or a request?’
Kathy winced. ‘A hint?’
Sergio laughed with rich appreciation and curved possessive hands to her tiny waist. ‘It was way too bossy to be a hint.’
His hands closed over the pert swell of her small breasts. She leant back against him with a helpless little moan, shaken by how sensitive she was to that first light touch. The hunger she had fought while Ella needed all her attention was breaking free of her control. A score of times she had watched Sergio walking towards her and she had blocked out the sexual response that had once betrayed her so badly. Those artificial barriers crumpled once she reminded herself that they were married, that, in spite of all the mishaps that had gone before, they were now together. Her soaring sense of relief at that truth made her dizzy.
Filled with sudden impatience, Kathy turned herself round clumsily in the circle of his arms and stretched up on tiptoe to find his mouth for herself. That stolen taste of him was impossibly seductive. He hauled her to him and kissed her with bruising passion, answering the fierce need in her with an accuracy that shook her. He lifted her onto the bed and reached for the silk panties that hugged her hips to peel them off.
Panting for breath, her rosy lips swollen from his attention, Kathy gazed up at him with anxious eyes. Even though she had never felt more naked or exposed, she made no attempt to cover herself up because she accepted that he wanted to look at her. She held her breath in fear that a shadow would cross his face as he suddenly appreciated that she was too skinny and lacking in curves to compete with tiny, curvaceous Grazia, and that her body was marred by the scars of her past and of childbirth.
‘You have the most wonderful figure.’ Wholly intent on her, Sergio skated an undeniably admiring hand down over her narrow ribcage to a slender thigh still clad in lace-topped white hold-up stockings. ‘Elegant, graceful…’
Kathy stretched so that he could better admire her from all angles and ready amusement curved his handsome mouth even as his gaze marked her every move with very masculine appreciation. He shed his boxer shorts without ceremony. She looked at him in turn, for he was beautifully built. The lean, hard, muscular lines of his powerful bronzed body bore out his reputation for being as super fit as an athlete. Her attention rested on his rampant state of arousal and colour warmed her cheeks.
‘This is the first place we make a deal, delizia mia,’ Sergio murmured, pulling her up against his long, sleek, masculine frame
‘A deal?’ Her green eyes flew wide.
‘While I concentrate on what pleases you outside the bedroom you can concentrate on what pleases me inside it.’
Kathy studied him in honest wonderment. ‘Are you really that basic?’
Sergio nodded affirmation without hesitation. ‘I want to spend the entire week in bed,’ he growled. ‘I am so hungry for you I almost dragged you off from the church.’
Kathy was blushing like mad. But she really liked the idea of being lusted after; a man ma
king her the focus of his erotic intent was most unlikely to be thinking of another woman at the same time.
‘Under the table at the reception…into another room…up against the wall…on the floor,’ Sergio enumerated thickly. ‘In my fantasies you’re insatiable, delizia mia.’
‘Am I?’ Kathy whispered a split second before the hungry onslaught of his mouth silenced her.
Fizzing little signals of response darted through her bloodstream and fired inside her with every wicked probe of his tongue. Her body was hypersensitive and geared up for him. For the first time she was eager to touch him and conduct her own explorations. For the first time she was confident enough to be his lover. She traced the solid wall of his chest with admiring fingertips, traversed the taut flatness of his muscular stomach, and when she hesitated he took over to guide and teach her and she learned that it was astonishingly easy to make him groan.
‘Enough,’ he growled. ‘This is our wedding night. I want to give you pleasure.’
‘You’re so traditional.’ Eyes bright as stars, empowered by newly learned skills that had done wonders for her assurance, Kathy flopped back against the pillows. Breathless, she watched him, her gaze clinging to his lean, strong face. There was a wicked tight knot of longing clenched at the heart of her. All he had to do was mention pleasure and she was boneless with expectation.
‘No, I’ve waited too long to lie here and keep my hands off your beautiful body,’ Sergio breathed roughly.
Hot, hungry golden eyes assailed her and her mouth ran dry. He spread her beneath him and smoothed a possessive hand over the swollen pink peaks of her breasts. She shivered. A wicked smile of knowledge slashed his strong, sensual mouth.
‘You are so ready for me, amata mia,’ he told her, dipping his tousled dark head to lock his mouth to the tiny taut, straining buds that betrayed her arousal.
Kathy gasped out loud, her hips squirming into the mattress. With controlled passion and endless skill, he traced his sensual path down over her slender twisting length, deliberately not touching her in the one place where she most yearned to be touched. As if in compensation other areas seemed to become much more sensitive in response while the blood thrummed in her veins and her heart pounded faster and faster. A river of elemental fire was flowing through her, burning and scorching everything within its path.
‘Sergio…’ She almost wept with impatience.
‘No orders, instructions or even hints allowed, cara mia,’ Sergio warned huskily. ‘This is one of those occasions when I really do know what I’m doing.’
And she learned things she didn’t know about herself. She learned she liked things she had never dreamt she might like. She also learnt a level of response that was terrifyingly powerful. When she believed she could stand no more she found she had no voice to tell him so. He wrested all control, all reasoned thought from her. The ache of need was overwhelming. She was shaking with desire when he chose the optimum moment to take her enjoyment to its zenith. Easing her under him, he plunged into her tender depths with potent power.
Irresistible sensation seized her in a tempestuous flood. He said her name and she moaned a response, locked to him in wild arousal. In thrall to his sexual energy, her excitement soared to a dizzy high. His desire for her was unquenchable, energising. She was all liquid heat and craving. Caught up in a delirium of spellbinding pleasure, she arched her spine and cried out at the height of release. Melting waves of delight followed and left her rocked to the core of her being over the strength of what she had experienced.
‘I think I’m going to like being married,’ she whispered blissfully, both arms wrapped round him as she hugged him tight with instinctive affection.
An ocean of love and forgiveness was washing round Kathy’s heart. She breathed in the musky perfume of his skin and sighed with contentment. He pushed her hair off her brow and kissed her and studied her with slumberous dark-as-night eyes fringed by spiky black lashes. Just looking at him she felt weak. ‘You were right,’ she added, feeling that just this once a small compliment might be due. ‘You don’t need instructions.’
The silence lingered and she wondered what he was thinking about. Grazia? The idea and the name came at her out of nowhere and dropped like a giant rock on her floaty feelings to crush them flat. Wasn’t it odd that he hadn’t even asked what Grazia had said to her the night before? He was certain to have thought about Grazia after seeing her today, Kathy reasoned uneasily. He was only human, but she didn’t want him to be only human, and she definitely didn’t want him thinking about his former fiancée and soon-to-be-ex-sister-in-law.
‘Were you madly in love with Grazia?’ Kathy asked abruptly, and she was so horrified by the nosy question that had simply leapt from her brain to her tongue that she almost cringed in front of him.
Sergio released his hold on her and sat up. ‘What do you think?’
On the might-as-well-be-hung-for-a-sheep-as-a-lamb principle, Kathy added with equal abruptness, ‘Did you speak to her today?’
His jaw line squaring, Sergio groaned out loud. ‘No, I think she was only in the building for about ten minutes.’
Her face burning at what might or might not have been an unkind allusion to the incident with the red wine, Kathy muttered, ‘She mentioned that she’s divorcing your brother.’
Sergio shot her a sudden shuttered glance. Lean, extravagantly handsome features sombre, he vaulted out of bed. ‘I need a shower.’
‘And you’re the guy who’s going to change and share things with me?’ Kathy flung, cut to the bone and wishing she could shut up—but quite unable in her sense of humiliation and abandonment to make herself shut up.
‘Madonna diavolo—not stuff like that!’ Sergio countered without hesitation.
The bathroom thudded shut. Lesson one, don’t mention Grazia, Kathy reflected unhappily. Even after eight years there was unfinished business there. But grilling him like a silly jealous schoolgirl had scarcely been the subtle route to take. She wished she had kept quiet. She wished she hadn’t spoiled that lovely precious moment of closeness with prying questions. And over and over again she kept on seeing that hard, closed look on his face.
Ten minutes later, Sergio emerged, black hair slicked back, a towel wrapped round his lean hips. ‘Come here, amata mia.’
Kathy dealt him an aggrieved look while simultaneously admiring his incredible physique. ‘No, I’m sulking,’ she confessed from the depths of the four poster.
‘Wouldn’t you like to cool off in the pool?’
‘I can’t swim,’ she admitted stonily.
Sergio could not hide his surprise. ‘Okay. But you’ll be safe with me.’
Kathy wondered if there would be shallow steps at one end on which she could sit, because she was very warm and the prospect of cool water on her overheated body was extremely tempting. She hovered between a desire to make him suffer, hurt pride and acceptance.
‘I have champagne on ice waiting downstairs.’
‘I’m really not into all that vintage stuff,’ she told him huffily. ‘You’re never going to educate my palate.’
‘I also have your favourite Swiss chocolate.’
Sergio had saved the best and most seductive offer for last. Her taste buds salivated. As he had discovered one night at the hospital when she had been too afraid to leave Ella to eat, she simply adored chocolate. Her head flipped over, light green eyes arrowing across the room. ‘All right—but there is a ground rule. You are not allowed to touch me.’
‘Let’s see who surrenders first,’ Sergio murmured lazily.
Six weeks later, Sergio guided Kathy into a room at the palazzo. As instructed her eyes were tightly shut. He spun her round to heighten the tension.
‘Can I look yet?’ Kathy demanded.
‘Go ahead.’
Kathy blinked: he had taken her out of bright sunlight and it took a while for her eyes to adjust to the dimness. What she saw sitting on a table in front of her was a dolls’ house that appeared to be
the identical twin of the one she had owned in her childhood, but that she had believed she would never see again. Disconcerted, she simply stared, unable to fathom the coincidence, for she could not believe that it could actually be hers.
‘Say something,’ Sergio urged.
‘It can’t be mine…’ But she discovered that she was wrong. When she put out a hesitant hand and opened the front of the miniature house, she found all the little bits and pieces of furniture lined up in tidy ranks for inspection. She lifted the familiar little plastic doll with one leg and dressed in an overlarge knitted frock that her late adoptive mother had made for it.
‘It is yours,’ Sergio confirmed.
Her attention expanded to encompass the other things on the table-top. She set down the doll to study the collection of cat ornaments, one or two of which had had tails glued back on after getting broken in house moves. There was a bag of girlish keepsakes from her teen years and a little box of jewellery. Beside that sat a collection of photo albums and she leafed through them, suddenly frantic to reach the most important one and there they were—her adoptive parents’ photos intact and even spruced up from the faded pictures she recalled. Tears were running down her face without her even realising it.
‘Where did you get all this stuff from?’ she prompted chokily.
‘Your ex-boyfriend still had them—’
‘Gareth?’ she exclaimed.
‘Although his mother sent him to the dump with your possessions, he managed to hide this stuff in the attic. Hey…’ Sergio ran a knuckle lightly down her tear stained cheek. ‘I wanted to make you smile, not cry!’
‘I’m just overwhelmed!’ she sobbed, breaking down altogether. ‘You don’t know what this stuff m-means to me.’
Sergio eased her up against him and stroked a hand through her hair until she had calmed down again. ‘But I do. When my father changed his will and deprived me of most of what was to be my inheritance I lost everything below this roof but my clothes. Cecilia and Umberto liquidated the paintings, sculpture and furniture collected by my ancestors, as well as quite a few personal items that I wasn’t able to prove belonged to me.’