She had to yank herself back to the reality of the man in front of her, the man who had dumped her for her friend and now wanted to manipulate her into sleeping with him because he still happened to fancy her. As if that counted for anything.
“My plans are going really well, as it happens,” she told him coolly.
“Really? I’m all ears.” He stood up, reached for his folded jacket and the shoes he had earlier kicked off.
It hardly seemed fair that despite the rolled-up suit trousers, the bare feet and the shirt half-untucked from the waistband of his trousers, he still managed to look rakishly, dangerously sexy. How many men could pull off that look? Rosie wondered irritably.
“I’ll follow you in,” he said, gesturing for her to lead the way.
Rosie hesitated for a few seconds then packed up a few things and headed for the back door.
“Should I leave my muddy shoes out here?” he asked with such innocence that Rosie turned to glare at him. Angelo held up the shoes, the soles of which were covered in a thin layer of top soil. She had kicked hers off at the door and was now in her thick socks.
“Your house looks very clean,” he expanded, “And I know you’ve always found my messiness a little annoying.”
“Yet somehow you never bothered to change your ways,” Rosie found herself retorting.
“It’s not my fault that you were always such a vision of sexiness when you were bending down to pick up my jackets.”
Rosie inhaled sharply. She didn’t want this. She didn’t want to remember the way he would sometimes grab her, reduce her to breathless giggles as he peeled her clothes off and flung them to the four corners of whatever room they happened to be in, pretending to bribe her into making passionate love by promising to pick up all the scattered clothes himself.
“We need to talk, Angelo.”
“You were going to tell me all about your move and how you’ve been doing with your new career.”
“I know why you’ve come here. You want to talk about what you said the last time we met.” She folded her arms and stayed her ground.
“Remind me.”
“I’ve got my first job, Angelo. It’s not enormous but it’s perfect and I’m really hopeful that it’s going to lead to other jobs. I’m going to make a success of this business and I’m going to give it my best shot living here in the country. I like it. It makes a great change from living in a city. It’s peaceful. I don’t need your help in finding work. If I succeed or fail, I’m going to do it without you, because I think it’s best that we walk away from each other right now. If not for Mandy’s death, we wouldn’t be standing here having this conversation. We don’t need to...to...”
“To what?”
“You know what I mean!” She wondered how he had somehow managed to encroach her personal space without her noticing, so that he was standing directly in front of her.
“I know exactly what you mean.” He gently hooked his finger under the strap of the dungarees still on her shoulder.
“What are you doing? Don’t do that!” She slapped his hand but he was smiling at her, that gorgeous crooked smile that had always been able to do all sorts of weird things to her equilibrium. When he smiled like that, all the unpleasantness was forgotten. None of it had ever existed. It was just the two of them in their beautiful, sensuous world, far, far away from reality and the rest of the human race.
She was breathing quickly. When she took a step back, she bumped against the wall. Her eyes were glued to his face, mesmerised by his eyes and that sexy half-smile. He leant against the wall next to her, crowding her so that it was hard to think straight.
“I’m glad you turned down my offer for help,” Angelo said softly.
“You are?”
“I wouldn’t want to put you in a position of subservience, despite what I may have implied the last time we met.” Both straps were now off her shoulders so that the bib of the dungarees had flapped down. Her small breasts were pushing against the tight vest. He could make out the outline of her stretchy bra. It had always amazed him that, despite her job working as a cocktail waitress, she had had curiously prissy tastes when it came to her underwear. “I want to touch your breasts, Rosie. Will you let me? You know you want me to. We both know that.”
“You don’t get it. It doesn’t matter.” Her voice seemed to be coming from a long way off. She knew she should decisively pull the straps of her dungarees back up, but her arms hanging at her sides were as heavy and as useless as lead weights.
“If it didn’t matter, I wouldn’t be here and you wouldn’t be trying as hard as you could to pretend that you’d be better off with me gone.”
“We’ve already tried the whole relationship thing, Angelo!”
“Like I said, I’m not talking about a relationship. There’s no going back there for us and never will be. No, this will be much simpler, much cleaner.” Talking to her was driving him crazy. He had spent weeks thinking about touching her, making love to her, looking forwards to a point when she was no longer an uninvited part of his life, gate-crashing his peace of mind and sabotaging his concentration. He didn’t intend to spend days, weeks, wooing her into compliance, not when they both knew what they wanted.
He tugged the vest, which was gratifyingly slippery, pulling it up and over her breasts, breathing hoarsely and briefly closing his eyes at the sight of the little flowered stretchy scrap of cloth covering her. God, hadn’t she got rid of that bra? She’d always refused to be coerced into lacy underwear and he had gradually grown accustomed to her boring stuff, grown to love each and every nondescript item. Hell, how could he even think straight when he was fixated, captivated, by what he was looking at?
The overalls had dipped to below her waist, exposing her slender ribcage, the perfect flatness of her belly. She carried not a spare ounce of weight on her. More than anything else, Angelo did not want to waste time remembering how easy it had been for him to lose control with her. He was in control now, even though it didn’t quite feel that way. There was nothing spontaneous about this.
“Angelo.”
“I’ve always liked it when you said my name like that, in that breathless little voice.”
“We can’t. There’s too much history between us.”
“Forget the history.” He circled her waist with his big hands and moved them rhythmically upwards, stroking her ribcage until his thumbs were brushing the underside of her bra. “The only thing I want you to think about is what I’m doing to your body.”
As quick as a flash, he slid his hands underneath the stretchy bra and cupped her small breasts in his hands. The bra rode up over his knuckles and he shuddered when he looked down to the perfect mounds with their big, circular pink discs. “Tell me you don’t want this,” he grunted, edging closer so that she could feel the steel hardness of his powerful erection.
Rosie’s arguments were blurring, getting jumbled up as he began playing with her nipples, teasing the taut buds into stiff arousal.
“You hate me,” she whimpered. Her body wanted to sag and, as if he knew her better than she knew herself, could read her responses and react accordingly, Angelo scooped her up to carry her upstairs, working out the location of her bedroom by instinct and kicking open the door to a freshly painted room dominated by an old brass bed.
He deposited her on the bed, stood back and began to undress.
We need to clear the air, Rosie wanted to shout. There were questions that demanded answers and explanations she needed to have, but the weight of the three-year silence between them pressed on her like a smothering hand. What was the point having long discussions? Where would it lead? Nowhere. Stripped bare, wasn’t Angelo right? There was still this something between them that needed killing off. It was intense, it was physical and it had been lying dormant inside her ever since they had gone their separate ways.
She didn’t want that something to be her permanent companion any more than he wanted it to be his.
Stubborn pride and her sense of morality might wage war against the cold-blooded prospect of sleeping with him, but all her arguments crumbled when he was standing naked in front of her, bigger than she remembered. She wriggled out of the dungarees while he watched. His bold erection matched the slick wetness between her thighs and both were testament to how powerful the attraction between them still was.
With a sigh of hopeless resignation, Rosie surrendered to the inevitable.
“Good,” Angelo breathed with satisfaction. “You’ve stopped trying to have a debate on the subject.”
He sank onto the bed. Her bra had been discarded and her breasts pouted up at him, tantalising and provocative. But, before he really began to explore their sweetness, he pulled off her underwear, which was a little flowered G-string that matched the bra.
Her nakedness was headily familiar. The feel of her long, supple body hit him with the force of coming home and he ruthlessly squashed the bittersweet tide of memories surging up. This wasn’t about the past or remembering: this was sex devoid of all emotional content or connection. He pressed his body against hers, nudging apart her legs and inserting his muscular thigh between them so that he could rub the wetness there until she was pushing back in response, building up the rhythm that had always been there the second they had fallen into bed. Their bodies had learnt how to move together, and in a heartbeat it all came back.
When he eased off, Rosie squirmed to renew the contact, but he buried her protests with a fierce, hungry kiss, their tongues melding and meshing in frantic urgency. She hadn’t touched another man for three years and, released from its sexual drought, her body was quickly galvanised into heated, wanton reaction. She curled her fingers into his dark hair, drawing him to her, and then groaning with pleasure and arching back as he trailed hot kisses along her neck before descending to her breasts to take one throbbing nipple into his mouth.
The honeyed sweetness of her nipple was almost enough to make Angelo lose control. He had to fight to restrain himself from entering her. As he licked and teased the hardened bud, nipping and suckling, he squarely planted his hand between her legs. He slid two fingers into her and, as he rubbed, she moaned and whimpered and bucked, wanting more than just that.
Her slippery wetness on his fingers was driving him wild. Anticipation of feeling that wetness embrace his hard shaft was even more of a ferocious turn-on and he was going to take his time; he was going to build up slowly to a moment he seemed to have spent all these lost years waiting for.
He withdrew his fingers to curl them around her slender waist and then he began working his way down her flat, firm belly, tasting, licking and relishing the salty tang of her perspiration. Her stomach rose and fell quickly in time to her jerky breathing. As she parted her legs wider, he groaned softly at the sight of her opening up for him, as beautiful as a flower unfurling to reveal itself.
Very gently, he flicked his tongue over and along her clitoris and felt it expand and throb as he continued to tease it. He didn’t know how long he would be able to sustain an erection that was desperate for release. The musky scent of her filled his nostrils and, as he licked her, he expertly threatened sensory overload by slipping his fingers in so that there was no bit of her that wasn’t responding. Her fingers were curled into his hair and, when he stole a glance up, he could see that she was poised on the tipping point, her eyelids fluttering and her beautiful mouth half-parted on a cry of intense pleasure.
“Please, Angelo.”
“Not yet, baby. I want you to take me in your mouth and then, when neither of us can stand it any longer, I’ll come in you. I want us both exploding at the same time.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
WHEN ROSIE TRIED to compare what she and Angelo had now with what they’d had three years ago, she was at a loss. In a lot of ways, it was piercingly sweet and achingly familiar, and in many other ways it was as though she was involved with a completely different human being.
He had built an impenetrable barrier around himself and there was no way she could get past it. She had known that within days of them recommencing their relationship, if it could be called “a relationship.”
Rosie gazed out of the kitchen window to where the vegetable plot she was cultivating was beginning to take shape. On the upside, the catering was doing well. That first job, nearly six weeks ago, had generated several others and she now had a girl from the village who came in to help her when needed.
On the downside...
She stared at the bowl of chopped vegetables awaiting her attention.
Her body had never been more fully satisfied. Their love-making was fast and furious and always left her completely spent. Angelo would come down on a weekend, and he would stride into the cottage with one thing and one thing only on his mind, and her body would weakly and helplessly respond. He never stayed the night. He returned to sleep at his own mansion, to which she had yet to be invited.
There was a part of her that knew just how pathetic that was, how low her self-esteem must surely be to find herself in a situation where the only thing that mattered was sex. Deep down, Rosie knew that that was the huge difference between what they had now and what they had had then. In her mind, she labelled her old relationship as “before fallout” and before fallout, she’d been a girl madly in love, where every touch was invested with significance and every kiss carried the promise of a future.
There was no future in what they had now and that was made abundantly clear in a thousand different ways. Angelo was assiduous when it came to using protection, which was a blessing, but she got the message loud and clear that very first time—her body had been screaming for him and he had calmly donned protection, whilst informing her that any mistake that could possibly lead to an unwanted pregnancy would be nothing short of catastrophic.
The past was never mentioned. Underneath the surface, she could feel the ugly swirl of unanswered questions struggling to rebel against their imposed silence.
Why had he married Amanda? Had he loved her? Had it just been the sex? What had happened to the marriage?
On the single occasion when she had tried to introduce what had happened between them three years previously into the conversation, she had watched as the passion on his face was replaced by a cold, shuttered expression that had sent a chill down her spine.
Rosie wondered how long she would be able to last. How long before she cracked under the pressure of trying to maintain the same cool, unemotional front he found so easy? Every time they made love, she was convinced that it would be the last time and she hated herself for fearing the inevitable outcome; she hated her weakness for still wanting him so badly that it hurt, even though she always made sure that she was as cool and as cynical as he was, treating him with the same emotional distance as he treated her.
She heard the sound of his car pulling up on the drive. Early summer had arrived with a bang and, although it was already after eight, it was still bright and light outside. All the predictions she had made about the flowers blooming into riotous colour had been fulfilled. London, in comparison, was a grey place that was fast becoming a distant memory.
Gradually, all the walls had been repainted and much of the furniture replaced. Bit by bit, the cottage was being stamped with her own personality, although there were little things belonging to Amanda which she kept because they brought back fond memories of her friend before things had gone pear-shaped: pretty tins and boxes which Amanda had been fond of collecting even as a kid; a couple of pictures in frames; two vases—they were all in the larder waiting for a spot to be found in the cottage.
Forgiveness was a good place to be and she could feel herself getting there.
Rosie pulled open the front door. Her heart swooped and dived and did all sorts of ridiculous thi
ngs inside her as Angelo stepped over the threshold, already unbuttoning his shirt, to wrap her in an embrace.
“I’ve cooked for us,” Rosie murmured, pulling back rather than just succumbing on the spot to his powerful, masculine physicality. “There’s a vegetable dish I’m trying out for the catering job I have next Wednesday.” She scattered little butterfly kisses on his mouth and laughed when he pulled her forcefully towards him with a low growl.
“I’m not sure I can hold off until I’ve tasted the trial vegetable dish.” He moved against her so that she was left in no doubt that he was heavily aroused.
“We don’t have to have sex as soon as you walk through the front door,” Rosie muttered in the first small show of rebellion since they had fallen back into bed together six weeks ago. “I mean, we can actually have a glass of wine and some dinner, and maybe even watch a little television. There’s a show I want to see about wildlife.”
Angelo frowned. He had not expected this to last as long as it had, nor had he predicted that he would still be hot for her after weeks of losing himself at will in her succulent, sexily responsive body. Weaning himself off her was taking its time. Indulging in domestic cosiness wasn’t going to help the process.
“I’ll try the new dish,” he drawled. “But watching telly isn’t going to work for me.”
Rosie held her smile and shrugged. “It was just a thought—” holding the smile made her jaws ache “—but you’re right.” She wound her arms up and around his neck. “Watching telly is a waste of valuable time.”
Angelo gave a grunt of satisfaction and hoisted her off her feet to take her upstairs.
“One day you’re going to do something to your back doing stuff like this.” Rosie was laughing breathlessly and unbuttoning his shirt, which was difficult, as she was bounced up the stairs as though she weighed nothing.
“And will you play nurse and make me all better?” Angelo glanced down at her and their eyes tangled.
A Deal with Di Capua Page 11