“More of what we did today.” His response was instant.
Her pulse trembled. “Sex?”
“Yeah. Great sex.” He paced across the room, towards the terrace. Belatedly she recalled her glass of wine. He stared out at the view, the darkness of the night, the lashing of rain, and was quiet for so long she wondered if he’d decided not to finish the conversation.
“I come to Ondechiara every summer.”
Ice filled her veins as she recalled the fact Michael had told her as much.
“I never stay longer than September first and I won’t this year. But while I’m here and while you’re here, why shouldn’t we see each other?” He turned to face her, and there was something in his face she recognised and instinctively understood, because she felt it too. Hesitation. I don’t trust easily.
“Just for the next few weeks?” She prompted, feeling her way in this as much as he was.
“Si, absolutely.” He angled his body back to hers. “I don’t do relationships, Maddie. I’m not interested in anything beyond casual sex. It’s important that you understand that from the outset, because I’d hate to hurt you.”
“You wouldn’t.” Her eyes sparked to his. “I mean, I don’t want a relationship either.” And not with this man! If it weren’t for their connection through Michael, she’d likely feel completely differently. But it was too complicated, too entangled.
“Then it’s simple.”
“It’s not,” she shook her head, but how could she explain? How could she tell him what she’d been through and at whose hands?
“Did you enjoy sleeping with me?”
Heat rushed her face. “Yes.”
Pleasure showed in his eyes. “Do you want to sleep with me again?”
Hell, yes. She swallowed back her instant response. “It’s not that easy.”
“Why not?”
Great question; how to answer it? She knew she couldn’t tell him about Michael. And admitting that to herself showed her how much she did, in fact, want to keep doing what they started that afternoon. Because if she didn’t want more time with Nico, why wouldn’t she just throw the truth at him? It was a solid reason for avoiding any further encounters.
And yet…
“You had a bad break up?”
She nodded slowly.
“So let me help you forget the bastardo who hurt you,” he grinned, closing the distance between them. “Let me make love to you over and over again until you barely remember his name…”
How tempting it was! Especially when he brought his body to hers and took a step forward, pushing her against the wall so she was trapped within the strength of his frame.
He was going to kiss her and she was desperate for that, but before he did, she needed to make some kind of sense of this. Because her head and body were completely at war with one another. The smart thing to do was to run, far away from Nico at least, if not from Ondechiara. But there was her body, her heart, her desires. She wanted him simply for him, but it was more than that. Didn’t she deserve this? Michael had taken so much from her and here was a man who was offering her a few weeks of blissful, heady, no-strings fun. Why shouldn’t she enjoy that? No strings, just light-hearted, mind-blowingly sexy fun…
Because there was risk there, the kind of risk she’d worked hard to free herself from. Could she mitigate that?
“I would have rules.”
His smile made her tummy twist. “Bene. What are they?”
“No one could know about this.” She fixed him with a steely gaze. “I mean, no one.”
“Besides Dante, who else would I tell?”
“Who’s Dante?” Alarm bells sounded in her brain.
“My dog.”
“You have a dog?”
A growling noise of assent. “He hides during storms. If you’d stayed around longer, you’d have met him.”
She lifted her hand and punched him playfully but he caught her fist and lifted it to her lips, kissing her lightly so her stomach swirled.
“Fine, other than Dante, you don’t tell anyone and nor do I,” she murmured.
“Do you think I plan to shout our affair from the rooftops?”
His reference to their ‘affair’ spread goose bumps over her body, because it spoke of such a foregone conclusion. “My ex is…it’s so complicated. I prefer to keep my private life very, very private.”
“Me too.” He nodded crisply. “Consider it done.”
What else? “It can only be this summer.” Even as she spoke the words she felt regret fold around her. In another time and place, if he hadn’t been connected to Michael, if she hadn’t still been discovering her sense of independence after having lost herself completely to an over-controlling partner, she would have hated putting a time limit on this. But Michael made anything else impossible. “I mean it, Nico. I have a life in England I have to get back to at some point.” The very idea sent a sharp spear of dread through her. London was so full of Michael, so full of memories. But she missed home. She missed her parents, her dad. Her friends, who she’d completely disappeared from out of a need for self-preservation.
“Cara?” He captured her face in the palms of his hands, holding her still for his inspection. “I promise you, I do not want more than I’ve offered. Today was fun, si?”
“Si,” she repeated, nodding.
“So let us have more fun, and the moment we stop enjoying it, we end it. No hard feelings, no strings, no commitments, no promises we can’t keep. Bene?”
Her brain was shouting at her to see sense, to see reason, but Nico was standing right in front of her in his wet leather jacket, so impossibly sexy, like some kind of Greek God brought to life purely for her enjoyment.
Seeing clearly was over-rated, anyway.
Chapter 4
HE WATCHED AS SHE poured him a wine. Her movements were so graceful, her fingers deft in their manipulations. He leaned against the doorjamb and smiled. He hadn’t been lying. He didn’t trust easily, and never would, but he liked the company of women and Maddie was not like the women he generally knew.
He couldn’t put his finger on any difference in particular – he’d enjoy discovering them as he got to know her better – but there was an indefinable quality that fascinated him and had, if he was honest, from the minute he’d seen her windswept body on the top of the cliff near his home.
After they’d slept together, he’d fallen asleep. He hadn’t meant to, but the moment had been so blissful, the room so dark, his body so completely satiated, her breathing so soporific. Waking up to discover her gone had wrenched him from that satisfied state though. He’d walked through the house, going from room to room, presuming she might have gone in search of a bathroom, or some food or water, but after fifteen minutes, he’d accepted the fact she was, in fact, gone. Her missing clothes had cemented that realisation. Only she’d left her hat, and just the sight of it on the hook near the front door had filled him with a burning sense to see her again, even if only to understand why she’d bolted.
He’d come here only intending to ask her for an explanation, to say ‘goodbye’ and finish their encounter more satisfyingly. He didn’t like loose ends. But the same drugging sense of desire had rushed his body when she’d pulled the door of La Villetta open and the proposal of a casual summer affair had been issued from his lips before he’d really known what he was saying. Even with these boundaries in place, it was more than Nico generally offered a woman. A week tended to be the sum total of the time he spent with any one lover. It wasn’t arbitrary; it was simply how his body worked. He got to know a woman and moved on. No hard feelings, just like he’d said to Maddie.
But this wasn’t going to be an intense affair. They’d see each other occasionally – when the need overtook them, when it suited, just for this one summer.
It was actually unexpectedly kind of perfect.
“Are you hungry?” She shifted her gaze to his, her eyes feline and beautiful.
“I am always hungry.” He
grinned and saw the way she responded, desire sparking in her expression.
“Me too.” Her smile was captivating. Some people smiled with their lips but Maddie seemed to smile with her whole body. It overtook her completely so warmth burst from her soul.
“Let me see what you have.”
“What for?”
“To cook for you.”
“You’re going to cook…for me?”
“Sure. This surprises you?”
“Erm, yeah. Kind of.”
“Why?”
“You just don’t exactly scream ‘give me an apron’.”
He laughed. “Gender stereotyping?”
“More like powerful-billionaire stereotyping,” she corrected with a small shake of her head. “Don’t you run one of the biggest companies in the world or something?”
She hadn’t known who he was earlier, but he’d told her his last name and now she did. Did that change things for him? No. Everyone knew he was a Montebello. That was nothing new. But he did have to admit he’d liked the anonymity her lack of knowledge had initially provided. His financial circumstances changed things. It had to. He was one of the wealthiest people in the world – there weren’t many people who could fail to be impressed by that.
“I run a sixth of it,” he murmured in agreement, moving to the fridge, pulling open the doors. Ciabatta, garlic, tomatoes. He turned to face her and caught her eyes staring at his rear. He grinned to himself, but to Maddie, he made a tsking sound. “You shouldn’t store tomatoes in the fridge, Maddie. You’re in Italy now.”
It was like her smile had been forcibly smothered. Her eyes assumed a look of something he could only describe as fear and an apology flew from her lips. “I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”
“I’m joking,” he rushed to reassure her. But her contrite statement was confusing and unsettling. She reminded him again of Dante, when he’d first taken the stray dog in. “You can store your tomatoes anywhere you want. But they are better when warmed by the sun and daylight.” He pulled all the tomatoes from the fridge, placing them on the table, purposefully not looking at her as he arranged them, because he wanted to give her a moment to compose herself. He wasn’t sure why she’d have such a strong reaction to a simple joke but she had, and he instinctively knew that she didn’t want him to read too much into it. He shelved it for later analysis and pretended he hadn’t registered her overreaction.
“What are you making?” Sure enough, her voice sounded almost normal afterwards, only to Nico’s ears, there was an overbrightness to it that showed him she was still a little affected by his comment.
“Pappa al Pomodoro,” he lifted his eyes to hers, infusing his smile with warmth and reassurance. “Have you ever had it?”
She shook her head. “But really, you don’t have to cook…”
“I want to.” He stepped around the kitchen bench, bringing his body to hers, wanting to erase the last remnant of stress that filled her eyes. He pressed his forehead to hers, breathing her in. “I like to cook. And I like the idea of cooking for you.”
“You’ll let me help?”
“I’ll let you sing for your supper,” he corrected. “Your job,” he reached for her hips and lifted her with ease, placing her on the bench top. “Is to entertain me with stories. Understood?”
“Got it.”
“And tell me where things are,” he tacked on, pressing a kiss to her lips, standing in between her legs. It was a mistake. Kissing her made his body instantly crave more, and he felt the same desire swamp her. Her arms lifted and wrapped around his neck, her fingertips tangling in his hair, her breathing erratic.
He pulled away from her while he still could, because nearness was dangerous, temptation overwhelming. “Chopping board?”
“Over there.” Her words were husky. He smiled as he turned away, sure that it wouldn’t be long before they indulged this mutual desire. And there’d be no running away afterwards.
He pulled a chopping board from behind the stovetop, placed it on the table, then rinsed the tomatoes.
“So?” She sipped her wine. “What would you like to hear?”
“Let’s start with the basics. How old are you?”
“I thought I was telling a story, not being interviewed,” she responded drily.
“Is your age a secret?”
Her half-smile twisted something inside of him. “No. I’m twenty six.”
“Knife?”
She hesitated for the briefest moment. “In the drawer.”
“Grazie.” He pulled out the sharpest blade and returned to the tomatoes, chopping each until there were at least forty halves scattered across the bench top. “How many books have you written?”
“Written? Oh, about a dozen. Published? Two.” She held two fingers in the air. At his quizzical look, she shrugged her shoulders. “I started writing when I was a kid, finished my first book at thirteen. It’s a teen sleuth story, lots of angst and mystery and stormy nights that end in disaster for my protagonist. The stories became a little more nuanced as I got older.”
“Is that what you write now?”
She nodded. “More or less. I write a series of books for young adults. They’re mysteries, and my main character is a kickass school girl who isn’t afraid of anyone or anything.”
“Did you always know you wanted to write?”
She was quiet for a moment. “I did, yeah. I loved to read, but I would often get frustrated by the way a story ended. I wanted to reach inside the pages and rearrange them, to give the characters something different. The only way I could do that was to write my own book, so I did.” He looked towards her as a faraway look overtook her eyes. Rather than interrupt her, he hunted around until he found a spoon and bowl, and began to scrape the seeds from the tomatoes, placing them all into the bowl. “We didn’t have a lot growing up. My mum’s a doctor, but she works for War Zone, the charity, so didn’t earn a huge salary, and she’s away almost all the time. It was pretty much just dad and me.”
“What does he do?”
“He’s a high school English teacher.”
“Uh huh, so this is where you get your love of books?”
“Undoubtedly.” She nodded. “Every Friday night, we’d go to the library and borrow as many books as they’d let us. Our weekends were spent reading.” She reached for a sprig of rosemary that was in a vase on the counter and ran her fingertips over the blades. As with before, he admired the deftness of her slim fingers, momentarily distracted not just by her body but by her words. “In the summer, we’d throw the books into a basket with some grapes and cheese and go and find a park. We’d spend all day on a picnic blanket, reading, snacking, cloud-watching. It was bliss.”
A jolt of something a lot like envy speared Nico, surprising him with its intensity. “He sounds like an attentive father.”
“He was. Is.” She nodded, but there was a cloud over her expression now.
“You’re close to him still?”
“Sort of.” She looked away and he knew there was so much more to this than she was saying. Before he could think of a way to tease out some more information, she smiled brightly and leaned forward a little. “What about you? You’re a Montebello, you help run your family corporation – as you do -,” she added teasingly. “You spend summers in this idyllic town. What else?”
“What do you want to know?” He thought of how much information there was about him on the internet. He was an open book because he was basically forced to be. As a teenager and in his early twenties, he hadn’t yet learned the discretion that was now his stock in trade. So much of his life had been played out for the tabloids and it lived online to this day – a stark reminder to guard what he said and did with great care.
“Are you close to your parents?”
“No.” Finished with the tomatoes, he pulled an onion from the bowl on the bench. He began to chop it, but he could feel her eyes on him the whole time. “My upbringing wasn’t conventional.” He lifted his shoulders. “The
n again, whose is?”
“A lot of peoples,” she offered. “But yeah, I can imagine you grew up in a pretty rarefied way.”
“You could say that.” He placed the knife down and her eyes followed the blade’s journey. “Now, I need a really big pot.”
She lifted her eyes heavenwards. “Up there.” He turned around and saw all the pots were above the cupboards. He reached for the largest and when he turned around to face her, there was a look of bemusement on her face. “Maybe you need to reach for something else?” He frowned, not understanding, but then her eyes roamed his body and he laughed, her obvious admiration spreading answering desire through him.
“You do realise I have to grab a stool anytime I want to get a pot down?”
“You do realise you’re about a foot shorter than me?”
He turned the stove top on, placed the pot down and added a dash of olive oil then the onion and a clove of garlic he crushed quickly.
“You really are a good cook,” she admired after a moment, when the air was thick with the savoury aroma of the spices.
“You haven’t eaten it yet.”
“I can tell already.”
“My Yaya,” he said after a moment, a smile on his lips as he thought of the grandmother who’d raised him, and his brothers and cousins. “She insisted we all learn to cook – with varying degrees of success. I was probably the most willing of her students, but by the time we went off to high school, we could all make a few meals. And when we came home on holidays, she’d draw up a roster to make sure we each had a turn doing dinner.”
“That sounds like a very humble way to grow up, given you probably had a trust fund the size of a small country.”
“It was.” He added the tomato shells, stirring them until they were coated in garlic and onion, then placing a lid on top to let them sweat for a few minutes. “Yaya didn’t grow up with money. In fact, she grew up – how did you say it? With not a lot? And despite Gianfelice’s success and means, she never stopped being frugal. Even now, she saves newspapers to wrap Christmas gifts in.” His smile was indulgent. “She is the reason I will freeze that pulp,” he nodded to the bowl on the bench, “rather than throwing it out. It will make a good passata,” he imitated Yaya’s Greek accent.
Just This One Summer: A billionaire forbidden love romance... (The Montebellos Book 2) Page 5