by Lynne Graham
Her heart skipped a beat and then began to thud heavily. Her stomach clenched. The silence lingered and Gianni’s eloquent mouth tipped into an indolent smile that welded her attention to him.
‘I’m a real pessimist about most things,’ Gianni shared softly. ‘But in one field I’m rarely disappointed…’
A curious languor had crept over Milly. Her body felt weighted, yet incredibly alive, every sense feeling somehow keener, sharper. What a wonderful voice he had, she thought absently, as a little tremor ran down her taut spinal cord. Like sinfully rich chocolate. Sin… Her abstracted brain began to play with the word. Sinfully stunning, sinfully sexy…
Hot pink staining her cheekbones, she attempted to concentrate on what he was saying—which was a little difficult, she discovered, when he wasn’t actually saying anything!
Slumbrous golden eyes framed with lush ebony lashes rested on her. And, like a tidal wave, Milly felt an enormous rush of yearning well up inside her. She remembered that sensational kiss. The cymbals…the fireworks. Unwittingly, she began to lift her head, push up on one elbow, soft lips tremulously parted, her slim length beginning to curve towards him as if he was a magnet and she was a nail.
‘And you have never once disappointed me in that field,’ Gianni informed her huskily.
Milly hadn’t a clue what he was talking about, and couldn’t have strung two rational thoughts together. ‘Didn’t I?’ she managed breathlessly.
‘In that one corner of our relationship I had total and absolute control.’ Gianni’s wide, sensual mouth curved into a wickedly charismatic smile that squeezed her heart in a sneak attack.
The dim light accentuated the smooth dark planes and hollows of his chiselled features. His bronzed skin was vibrant against the pristine whiteness of his shirt. With one long, lean and powerful thigh raised in a very masculine attitude of relaxation, Gianni was so physically arresting he just took her breath away.
In fact, she was so tense her muscles hurt. Yet she couldn’t make herself move, couldn’t drag her eyes from him, couldn’t suppress the increasingly desperate craving holding her so still. Gianni bent his dark head slowly. His breath fanned her cheek. He let his tongue dart between her parted lips and she jerked and moaned and reached up for him, her hands spearing fiercely into his silky black hair.
He did it again, and her whole body leapt, electrified. Just one kiss, just one kiss, she promised herself, like an alcoholic craving what she knew she shouldn’t have.
‘Oh Gi-anni…’ she gasped on the back of an aching sigh.
He pressed his mouth to her cheek, her brow, her lowered eyelids, teasing her with feather-light kisses until she strained up to him even more. ‘Any time, any place, any way I want,’ Gianni murmured thickly. ‘I don’t have to say anything, I don’t have to do anything. I just start thinking about sex and you are so tuned in to me you just melt…’
He kissed her, and it was like being shot to heaven on a rocket. She melted to boiling point in seconds. He made love to her mouth with an intimacy that shook her. He delved and tasted and skimmed until she was burning up, clutching at him, living from one second to the next on the single terrifying thought that he might stop.
Peeling her hands from him, Gianni lowered her back to the bed. He sat up and ripped off his shirt in one impatient movement. Struggling to get air back into her constricted lungs, Milly was totally transfixed. He had a torso like a Greek god. Wide brown shoulders, rippling pectoral muscles roughened by a triangle of black curling hair and a stomach as flat as a washboard.
A tiny pinching sensation attacked low in her pelvis. She felt light-headed, but her body was so tense it screamed at her, every sense recognising Gianni as her lover. The scent of him, the touch of him, the very taste of him. She couldn’t believe what was happening to her. She shivered in shock laced with a kind of death-defying excitement.
‘Gianni…’ she whispered jaggedly, struggling to reinstate some form of control, some sense of reality to her own mounting disorientation. ‘I…we—’
Gianni came back down to her, dark eyes now bright as flames, his feverish tension as marked as her own. She saw a hunger in him that twisted something painfully inside her, and with a muffled little sound of surrender she reached up instinctively and opened her lips to him again.
With a dark, driven groan of satisfaction, Gianni lifted her up to him with two powerful hands and ravaged the tender interior of her mouth with a raw, demanding passion that overwhelmed her.
‘We both need this,’ he said thickly. ‘You want me; you always want me…’
She looked at him, her heart pounding like crazy. She raised a trembling hand and touched his beautiful mouth with tender caressing fingertips, controlled by instincts that filled her with almost unbearably powerful feelings. ‘Like I need air to breathe,’ she whispered shakily.
Gianni raised her up and divested her of her nightdress with an easy expertise that somehow shocked her. And suddenly that wholly inborn feeling of security abandoned Milly. She stared in dismay down at the ripe swell of her bare breasts, her face hot with colour. She felt wanton, and then very, very shy as Gianni’s gaze burned over her exposed flesh like the kiss of fire.
‘Dio…’ he growled, raising an unsteady hand to cup a pale, pouting breast adorned by a straining pink nipple, lingering to rub a thumb and forefinger over that stiffened peak.
The violence of her own response tore a startled moan from Milly. Her mind closed in on itself again, stripping away that brief awareness of anything beyond the physical. She shut her eyes tight, letting her head fall back. As he toyed with the achingly sensitive bud her own heartbeat thrummed in her eardrums.
‘I always adored your breasts. You’re exquisite,’ Gianni groaned, knotting one possessive hand into her cascading mane of golden hair and letting his mouth swoop down to replace his fingers.
Excitement took hold of her like a bushfire, blazing out of her control. The erotic mastery he unleashed with the tug of his teeth and the wet rasp of his tongue dragged her down so fast into a world of pure sensation that she was lost. She moaned and twisted, suddenly hotter than she could bear. She was wildly aware now of the maddening burn at the very core of her body, the pulse of damp warmth beginning to beat and ache between her thighs.
Gianni wrenched back from her to dispose of the remainder of his clothing. Milly opened passion-glazed eyes. She was trembling, her whole body just one gigantic pleading ache. ‘Gianni…please…’ She didn’t even know where the words came from.
‘It hurts to want this much, doesn’t it?’ Gianni leant over her, his long, lean body golden and tight with leashed power in the lamplight. His brilliant eyes savoured her quivering tension, watched her look at him with wonder.
‘Yes…’ It hurt like a knot tightening and tightening inside her. Her spellbound gaze roamed down over his powerful frame, lingering in sensual shock on the aggressive masculine thrust of his virility. Her mouth ran dry and it was like something unlocked inside her, loosing a hot flood of honey to pool heavily at the very heart of her.
All conquering male, Gianni pulled her close. Then he stared down into her hectically flushed face, his spectacular bone structure ferociously taut, his bright eyes curiously chilling, his beautiful shaped mouth hardening. ‘We always connected best at this level, cara mia.’
Something in that dark sardonic drawl spooked her, but before she could try to identify that apprehensive dart of unease Gianni eased her slender thighs apart and began to explore her wildly sensitive flesh. Her body jack-knifed under that surge of almost intolerable pleasure. It was mindless, all-encompassing, and she craved its continuance with every tortured and sobbing breath she drew.
But it was still a surprise when Gianni came over her, sinking rough, impatient hands beneath her squirming hips. And suddenly he was there, where the ache was worst, entering her in one powerful thrust that made her cry out.
Excited beyond belief by him, Milly clashed with the charged darkness of his
eyes. ‘Gianni…?’ she gasped.
‘Madre di Dio…I have to black out my memory to do this!’ Gianni gritted savagely, driving into her again, making her tender flesh yield more fully to enclose him.
And even as she struggled to comprehend what was wrong, what he meant, the primitive rhythm of his possession engulfed a body too long starved of such sensation. Her confusion was not equal to the overpowering hunger he had awakened. With every driving invasion Gianni sent excitement hurtling through her at storm-force potency. Hot, aching pleasure took her over. Release came in a shattering ecstatic surge that jolted and freed what felt like every fibre of her being.
Within seconds, Gianni hit that same peak with a shuddering groan. Her arms came round him, tears flooding her eyes. That didn’t surprise her. It always happened. Sometimes she loved Gianni so much she wanted to scream it from the rooftops, she thought helplessly. She pressed her lips adoringly to a satin-smooth shoulder damp with sweat and whispered it instead.
With startling abruptness he pulled back from her. With a bitten-off Italian curse, he shoved himself away from her. Then he surveyed her with blazing anger and condemnation. ‘Bye-bye, Edward, hello, Gianni—all in the space of one day?’ he ground out raggedly, strikingly pale beneath his naturally dark skin. ‘What sort of a fool do you take me for?’
And Milly went into deep shock then. The cloaking, blinding veil of physical satiation was torn from her mind and dissipated as though it had never been. Every scrap of colour drained from her stricken face as she stared at Gianni, and she stared at him and registered that both past and present now existed in a seamless joining inside her head.
Gianni snatched in a shuddering breath. ‘OK…you didn’t mean to say it and I overreacted,’ he conceded, a slight tremor interfering with his usually even diction, his Sicilian accent very strong.
Sicilian to the backbone, Milly recalled absently, locked into the terrifying enormity of the memories hitting her now from all sides.
‘Stop looking at me like that,’ Gianni told her.
He thinks he’s going to have to apologise, and he hates apologising, so he’s digging himself into a deeper hole because when he’s really upset about anything he will go to enormous lengths not to confront that reality. All the strength in Milly’s body just seeped away as she completed that instant appraisal. She was immobilised by what had happened inside her own head. She had finally got her memory back. Now the shock was telling.
‘Milly…’ Gianni sat up, dark, deep flashing eyes narrowing on her anguished face and the distance in her eyes. A distance which suggested that though she might appear to be looking at him, for some reason he wasn’t really registering.
Gianni, the love of her life, Milly labelled him, in a growing haze of emotional agony. Walking away, acknowledging defeat, had been like driving a knife into her own heart.
‘You hate me…’ she framed sickly, shaking her head back and forth on the pillow in urgent negative, soundless tears beginning to track down her cheeks. ‘You touched me, hating me!’
Gianni was stunned.
‘And how do I know that?’ Milly gulped strickenly. ‘I know that because I can remember everything—but I don’t want to…I don’t want to remember!’ she lashed at him in passionate pain.
Gianni laid Milly down on the great canopied bed in the master suite of his country house—which he had yet to spend a single night in. Back at the hotel, the doctor had given her a sedative, and had then told Gianni in no uncertain terms exactly what he thought of him.
There had been no hiding the fact that that hotel bed had harboured more than one body. With a humility that would have astounded all who knew him, Gianni had withstood being called a selfish swine. At that instant, hovering while Milly shivered and shook with those horrible silent tears, Gianni would have welcomed far stronger censure if it had in any way lessened his own appalling sense of guilt.
He had traumatised her. Him. Nobody else. The Jenningses had loved her, and would have protected her while she tried to come to terms with what was happening to her. But he had deliberately severed every tie she had and then quite ruthlessly seduced her back into sexual intimacy. She hadn’t been ready for that. She might never have been ready for that again. He had hit on her like a stud when she was weak and confused and scared. She had trustingly turned to him for comfort and he had let his driving need to re-establish a hold on her triumph. He had never sunk so low in his life…
And it was no consolation to know why he had done it. Jealousy, bitter and angry, seething up inside him like hot, destructive lava. The thought of Milly loving Benson, wanting him, sleeping with him. Thinking about her with Stefano had been bad enough, but he had learned to block that out. Iron self-discipline had worked for three years. Only it had come apart at the seams the instant he’d tried to make love to her again, suddenly terrified for the first time in his life that he might not be able to do it and then acting like an animal in rut. Great footnote, Gianni. The one and only thing that was ever perfect, you blew!
‘Not sleeping?’ Connor asked, his little face full of hope.
‘Not sleeping,’ Milly confirmed gruffly as she set aside her breakfast tray and dragged her son down into her arms to tickle him, listening to his delighted chortles with a sudden lightening of her heart. She kissed his soft cheek and ran a fingertip lovingly down over his small nose. ‘I gather I’ve been sleeping too long.’
Connor scrambled down off the bed at speed. Retrieving something from the floor, he clambered back up to show it to her. It was a child’s board book. He pointed to the golden-haired princess sleeping on the front cover and said with tremendous pride, ‘My mummy!’
As she noted the title, Milly breathed in very deep. The Sleeping Beauty. Gianni was very creative in tight corners, and explaining Mummy’s sudden need to sleep the clock round and more had evidently not over-taxed his agile brain. Gianni, she reflected tautly, for so long never more than a heartbeat away from her next thought.
Why, oh, why hadn’t he just let her stay lost? Connor. But not only Connor. Revenge, she decided with a helpless shiver. Revenge as only a Sicilian could enact it. In a reckless drunken attack of lust, Stefano had destroyed them. On his deathbed Gianni wouldn’t forgive her for what he believed she’d done to him. And at his coldest Gianni was at his most dangerous. If only she had been armoured with the knowledge that she was dealing with a male who hated and despised her when they’d first met again…
But then how many ‘if onlys’ already littered her history with Gianni? So she had ended up in bed with him again. So she had had a fantastic time. That was the painful crux of the matter, wasn’t it? That she had sobbed with ecstasy and clung to a guy who had invaded her eager body with all the rampaging finesse of a stud on a one-night stand!
Gianni, who had taught her that making love could be an art form, Gianni, who was endlessly creative in the bedroom but never, ever rough. Quite deliberately he had set out to use and humiliate her. But it had been the shatteringly sudden return of her memory which had torn her apart. And Gianni was in for a very big surprise if he fondly imagined she was about to greet him with shamed eyes and streaming tears at their next meeting!
But life went on no matter what, Milly told herself with feverish urgency. Gianni was Connor’s father now. Nothing more. Her problem was that she needed to learn a whole new way of thinking. Time hadn’t passed for her in quite the same way as it had passed for Gianni. Three years ago she had still been hopelessly in love with him. At the instant her memories came alive again she had been engulfed in a devastatingly intense storm of emotion, the most bitter sense of betrayal, loss and anguished pain. Because the man she loved had turned his back on her and walked away. It was those feelings she had to deal with now, and then she had to put them all away again, back where they really belonged—in the past.
From her magnificent bed, she surveyed her imposing new surroundings with grudging curiosity, and then, pushing back the fine linen sheet, she got up.
When she’d arrived, she had used the bathroom, which had been left helpfully lit with the door ajar. Now that she registered that there were three other doors to choose between she knew why.
Wandering over to one of the tall windows to glance out, she almost tripped over Connor in surprise. Beautiful gardens gave way to rolling fields and distant woodland. She had dimly assumed that she was in a townhouse, hadn’t thought to question the lack of traffic noise. Gianni now owned a country home? Gianni, who had once regarded the countryside as the long, boring bit between cities? But then what did she know about Gianni’s life these days?
Tensing, she instantly reminded herself that she didn’t want to know anything! With Connor tagging in her wake she went for a shower, and was drying her hair when a brisk knock sounded on the bedroom door. A youthful brunette peered in, and then flushed when she saw Milly in her bathrobe. ‘I’m sorry, Miss Henner. I didn’t realise you were up and about. My name’s Barbara Withers—’
Connor interrupted her with an exuberant cry of recognition. ‘Barb!’
‘I’m Connor’s temporary nanny. Mr D’Angelo did stress that a permanent appointment would be subject to your approval,’ she advanced anxiously.
‘Yes…’ Conscious of the younger woman’s discomfiture, Milly concealed her own disconcertion.
‘I was about to offer to take Connor outside to play. Since Mr D’Angelo left him with you after breakfast, I thought you might be tired now,’ Barbara explained.
So Connor hadn’t wandered into her bedroom under his own steam. Milly had been concerned that no adult appeared to be in charge of him. But it seemed that Gianni had sneakily fed their son in through the door without making a personal appearance. But then with Connor around perhaps that had been a wise decision, and she didn’t want him present when she saw Gianni again.