by Tara Pammi
Now she knew he was also honorable, that a warmth filled his gaze when he spoke of his wife, that even as he had discarded her the next morning, it had been driven by that sense of betrayal, that family and responsibility and duty were important to him.
Even as it grated, the ease and efficiency with which he’d taken over everything, it was hard not to bask in that. Hard not to feel pleasure at being looked after like that.
Hard not to take it personally.
She didn’t want to want him like this.
She didn’t want to fall into this trap of imagining things between them, of falling this low as to feel some kind of relief at knowing that he was unattached now. She deserved better than to want a man who thought of her as a betrayal, who tolerated her presence for the sake of his daughter.
Fortunately for her fragmenting peace of mind, she hadn’t been alone with Leandro the past few days at their home. Izzie and her parents had seen to that. And on the flight, when Izzie had fallen asleep, Alex had claimed to be tired, not falsely, and retired to the rear cabin and the inviting bed.
A couple of hours later, when he sat down on the narrow bed next to her, Alex jerked into such stringent awareness that her heart ratcheted in her chest.
The solid length of his legs next to her was alien yet alluringly comforting. Musk and something so intensely Leandro coated her every breath. Slowly, he pulled her hand into his and traced the scars.
There was nothing sexual in the touch, still, it burned through her, shaking loose some strange knot of yearning.
He wasn’t a tactile person, she’d noticed. Especially when it came to her, there was something very measured, very contained about his movements.
Unable to bear the tension any longer, she turned and opened her eyes.
The softly fading light in the cabin caressed the aquiline nose, the sweepingly sharp cheekbones. Softened the austere set of his mouth. Heat from his body enveloped her, churning her senses into a frenzy.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she whispered with not the least bit of anger she’d wanted in her tone. Instead, she sounded husky, weak. “It’s not necessary for you to touch me when Izzie’s not around.”
Did she imagine the soft glint to his gaze? The reverence in his touch as he traced the veins on her wrist? “I didn’t realize I was taking a liberty.”
“You expect me to believe you walk around touching women you barely know?” she muttered, her nose tickling against his thigh.
“You don’t agree that sharing a daughter affords us a kind of intimacy, cara? That it binds us as much as we fight it?”
To be bound to him in any way...just the thought set her shivering.
Warm fingers moved from her hand up her arm, kneaded one shoulder and then rested on her jaw. Moved into her hair and combed through the strands. Alex fisted her hands by her side, every inch of her vibrating.
“No,” she managed. “Intimacy and friendship and all such rights have to be earned. You and I...strangers who share a daughter. That you slept with me seven years ago doesn’t entitle you to anything with me now.”
Suddenly, his grip tightened in her hair. Not hurting but just enough to make her scalp tingle with awareness. The rough movement forced her chin up to face him. Something feral bared in his gaze, tearing at the mask of polite civility that embodied Leandro. “Such foul language from such a beautiful mouth, cara?”
But it was gone as fast as it came, just as his grip gentled immediately. She didn’t know what to make of that momentary fracture in his facade. “It’s exactly what you said.”
“As far as rights are concerned,” the honeyed warmth of his tone didn’t hide the steel beneath, “your well-being directly affects my daughter. That means I can interfere if I think you need help.
“You lied to me. You said you were sleeping better but I heard you. I do not like that fear, that anxiety in your tone.”
Her cheek tingled where his knuckles rested. Hadn’t she just told him off?
“Pity then, isn’t it?” She scooted on the soft cotton to get away from him and ended up even closer to the solid muscle of his thigh. “That you can’t order the panic gone, that you can’t order out that stress for me in that imperious way of yours.”
Now, he traced the bridge of her nose, hovered over her mouth. Her pulse raced. Lungs burned.
“You sound angry, Alexis. I have never met a woman who didn’t appreciate the benefits that come with my name and wealth. Will you resent me just for solving your problems? Will you resent me because I’m more interested in Isabella than you wanted?
“Or is it that you’re still attracted to me?”
“Don’t...presume things about me.”
“I’m not presuming your racing pulse.” His thumb landed at the incriminating spot on her neck. “Or hitching breath or the fact that you’re tense like a bow.” Long fingers stroked over the nooks and crevices of her shoulders, back and forth until she felt as though there was steel infused in her very veins. “Or that you jump like a cat every time I come near you.”
“Being attracted to you doesn’t mean I’m willing. I won’t be a convenient itch for you to scratch while you play at being daddy for the summer. Like I was some compensation prize after your broken engagement.”
“Playing at daddy?” A thread of anger spewed in his question.
“Isn’t that what you’re doing?”
“I assure you no, Alexis. I intend to take care of Isabella. I intend to be a proper father. If not for me, Luca and Tina would have suffered neglect. I don’t know if I made a difference even. And I will not let that be Izzie’s fate.”
“She’s not neglected.”
“But a father is important, si?
“Not just for the summer either. The sooner you accept that the better. I’m not grief-stricken over my broken engagement, cara.
“Marriage to Sophia was a business alliance. Breaking it had consequences that I’m now prepared to handle. Family comes before business, before anything else for me.”
The steely resolve in his tone sent her heart thudding against her rib cage.
He wanted to be a proper father to Izzie?
Had seeing Izzie, who was truly a mirror image of him, triggered some dormant fatherly instinct and decided the matter for him?
Hadn’t she read somewhere that nature made children in the image of their fathers so that they bonded with them?
Would he feel differently once he realized how hard being a parent was? How life changed because of a little girl?
“And when you marry eventually? Can you give me the reassurance that your new wife will not resent Izzie? Can you reassure me that you won’t resent her for all the changes she’ll bring to your life?
“I didn’t give up my social life because I like being a martyr.
“I gave it up because none of the men I met would have loved Izzie like a father should. Only Justin—”
“Look at me, Alexis.” His grip turned steely against her jaw, forcing her to look at him. The muscle in his jaw jumped. Gray eyes held a stormy anger. Banked, yes, but the fire showed a Leandro she didn’t recognize. “My daughter already has a father. Me. I will not let any man take that away from me. No other man can take that place in your life.”
“You’ve no right to tell me that I can’t have another man in my life, Leandro.”
“You just told me you’ve never met a man who would love Izzie like his own.” Frustration made his tone rise, but he wrested himself under control immediately. “We both want the same thing for Isabella. And for what we want, there are not many options left to us.”
Shock coursing through every vein, Alex stared at him numbly.
What the hell did he mean by that? Did he want her to move to Italy? Was he suggesting that they live together just for Izzie’s s
ake? Or was he—
God, no! The other alternative was outrageous to even think about.
Suddenly, all Alexis wanted was to be back in her parents’ tiny house with her never-ending financial problems and the store and even her fault-finding mother.
Anywhere but here, on this luxurious flight, with this man who’d taken over her life.
That same sensation of careening out of control came at her with a vicious force. “Either you’re crazy or I am, because I don’t think you suggested what I think you did.”
He shrugged. “With Isabella’s future in mind, we will come to an agreement that suits us both.”
An agreement that suited them both...
“After we land, I will be gone for a week. Will you be all right at the villa? Antonio will be around.”
The thought of a reprieve from Leandro and his outrageous ideas made her shudder in relief. She could deal with a hundred Antonios better than her own weakness for this man. “Yes. Of course. I understand that you have your life and commitments.”
“Being here has caused too many bottlenecks in the company, made me realize I need to delegate more. After Rosa’s death, I threw myself into work. But I don’t want Izzie to feel like I’m neglecting her any longer.”
“Leandro?”
“Yes, Alexis?”
“You said Rosa always wanted children and couldn’t conceive.”
His entire, polite demeanor faded at the mere mention of his wife’s name. “Yes?”
“What about you? Did you want to be a father?”
Silence had never been so fraught or so distorted for it felt like an age to Alexis before he answered.
Her stomach twisted into a knot as if her very fate depended on his answer.
“Si. I was ready to be a father.”
Before she could absorb that, he reached for her.
Cradled her jaw with one hand and pressed his mouth to the corner of hers. Insidious heat unfurled through every nerve. Her fingers dug into his arms, toes curled as she fought the hardest battle of her life.
To not shift and cover his mouth completely. To not throw herself headlong into the need vying for life.
Lips soft and hard at once moved against her tingling skin, sending arrows of pleasure directly to the center of her sex. “You, Alexis, are no consolation prize or a cheap summer fling.”
This time, when his hands moved over her shoulders and down her trembling body, over her waist, and hips and back up again, long fingers grazing the sides of her breasts, there was no gentleness. No comforting or soothing.
No gentling or caring.
But bold and roving and hungrily masculine and demandingly insistent. Those large hands of his touched desperately but not enough, luring her with a promise of more with his rough strokes. An exploration of the fire that burned between them the moment they touched each other.
That sinuous mouth moved an inch and an inch over, until he covered her own completely.
Such pleasure filled her that Alex groaned loudly. The sound vibrated through her bringing a threadbare rope of caution back.
“You think I would welcome advances from you two minutes after your engagement is broken? You think I’m so eager to fall back into that pattern again?”
It was every shameful thought she’d indulged in herself, and yet, she drew strength from the fact that she called him on it.
But he didn’t even budge an inch. Instead, he took over the space between them. Until their legs tangled. Until her breasts grazed his chest. Until even the thought of Izzie softly snoring on the bed in the front was driven from her head.
Only he and his stroking hands and strangely intense gaze remained. Only her awareness of him remained. Only this strange intimacy that she had denied him and yet he claimed remained.
How many times had she dreamed of a moment like this over the past seven years?
One hand under her chin, he tilted it up to face him. “In seven years, I have tried, so hard, to forget that night. To pretend like it never happened, si. But I never thought such a cheap thing of you.” His sigh rattled loudly in the cabin.
The reluctance in his tone made his statement all the more powerful. Made her insides into a pool of molten craving.
“I want you, cara. Just as I did all those years ago,” he muttered it as if it was a curse. As if he had accepted defeat. “Since the moment you walked into that lounge, guns blazing.”
Feral satisfaction filled every nerve, every cell.
To hear him admit that he wanted her, despite his discipline and control, a wildness, a raw sense of power filled her. She gave in to the sheer freedom of it. Just a stolen second, she told herself, before she became a mother and a daughter and a hundred other roles again.
Tremors took hold of her entire body as he continued trailing that mouth all over her face. Nose, brow, jaw, chin—it was as if he opened little portals of pleasure.
It was as if his touch could say things he couldn’t. And in sensually overwhelming contrast, his big body shuddered as he took her mouth again.
Alex felt her pulse vibrate everywhere—in her neck, her heavy breasts, her shaking knees and in the wet place between her thighs.
With his hot mouth devouring hers, Leandro slammed her against himself.
Alex climbed over him like a vine, the jut of his erection a hot press against her belly. She arched against him, looped her leg around his until she was riding his thigh.
Leandro egged her on, his fingers crawling under her silk blouse. The slap of his abrasive palm against her heated flesh, the slow exploration up her skin, her nipples distended against her cotton bra, desperate for his touch.
Alex moaned, and moved over him, mindless in her pursuit of pleasure. It was when his fingers reached the seam of her bra and pushed inside that Alex realized what she was allowing.
God, she had acted just as she said she wouldn’t.
A frustrated cry fell from her lips but he didn’t release her.
His forehead touched hers, his breath feathered her. Lips stinging from the raw assault of his, shame permeating her, she closed her eyes.
“Do you not see the inevitability of this, Alexis? Of how right everything is this time between us? How easily you melt in my hands, how I could make you scream with the slightest of touches? All the intimacies you’ll give, all your desires, all your needs, your every breath will be mine again.
“You will be mine.”
Such arrogance reverberated in his voice should have made her furious. And yet...at the core of her, she trembled at the want in it, at the intensity in it.
No one had ever wanted her like that. No one had ever put it into words like that.
With that reply, he left without glancing at her again.
Knees shaking, her sex aching for a release that wasn’t coming, Alex slid to the bed. He had everything so perfectly mapped out without even telling her.
Had he truly just switched the candidate for his wife from one woman to her? Was he that heartless? Did Leandro want a future with her, just for Izzie’s sake?
And if he did, Dear God, what was she going to do?
CHAPTER SEVEN
IN THE PROCESS of undoing his cuffs, Leandro stilled. Sounds of splashing waves accompanied by Izzie’s giggles, Luca’s deep laughter, Valentina’s broken English and Alexis’s husky warnings...it was pure cacophony at the villa. Like he’d never heard.
The afternoon sun beating down on him, he took the steps to the veranda like an eager schoolboy.
It seemed as if the entire villa was awash in a burst of sound and activity, unlike it had ever seen.
A small bicycle with training wheels and pink streamers lay against the marble pillar. An English paperback and a pink iPod lay on the bench in the garden.
/> Something in him flinched at the alien sounds and sights. At the sudden absence of that dark, deep silence that he’d become used to for so long.
Only now did he realize how much the silence of the past two decades had become a part of the tall pillars, the marble floors and even their very psyches. He’d thought he had made the villa a home for all three of them. But suddenly he wasn’t so sure for he had never heard such joy in the air.
The scent of jasmine felt richer, the sky felt bluer, the entire world felt as if it had transitioned from a gray, bleary morning to spring sunshine.
He closed his eyes and let his hearing amplify, let the sounds wash over him. He didn’t feel peaceful as he had during his marriage with Rosa, but then he didn’t expect life with Izzie to be peaceful.
He’d already accepted that life with Alexis wasn’t going to be peaceful.
And yet, strangely the thought excited him more than it made him uneasy.
It had taken him a week to wrap up the most urgent of his business obligations and return to their villa. He had spoken to Izzie a few times since then but every time, Alex refused to say anything except that they were doing okay.
Had he pushed her too far too soon?
He hadn’t meant to confront her like that on the flight, he hadn’t meant to touch her so intimately while their daughter lay asleep so close, but again, Alexis had fragmented his careful planning.
Running a hand through his hair, he strolled out into the veranda and looked at the pool. With the background of the gleaming blue of the pool, his gaze instantly found her.
Clad in a modestly cut, pink bikini, her blond hair framing her face in damp waves, Alexis sat above with her pink toes skimming the water. A serene smile touched her features as she closed her eyes and raised her face to the sun. Luca and Tina were playing with Izzie in the pool.
Two seconds, that’s all he could manage before his gaze turned back to her again.
Lush and lithe, her scantily clad body was a siren’s lure. He felt as if he’d been handed a treasure and didn’t know where to start or what to look at.