Sharon Kendrick - Hot-Blooded Italians

‘Will there be anything else, sir?’

‘No, that will be all, thanks.’

She waited until the boy had shut the doors behind him before turning on Vincenzo, who was taking his jacket off. ‘You said a drink. This is a suite!’ she accused.

Vincenzo smiled as he loosened his tie. So she wanted to play games, did she? ‘The two aren’t mutually incompatible, surely?’ With a careless hand, he indicated the ice-bucket containing champagne. ‘Drink all you like, cara .’

‘Are you saying that a table wouldn’t magically have become available if you’d asked for one?’ Emma asked, wishing she could rid herself of the terrible nerves which were criss-crossing through her stomach and beginning to tie it up in knots.

‘I could have asked for one,’ he conceded. ‘But you cannot deny that up here it is so much more comfortable—and so much more private, of course.’ He poured out champagne, which fizzed up like pale gold into two tall flutes, his eyes glittering with insolent challenge—wondering how long she was going to carry on playing the innocent. ‘Take off your coat and lets have a drink. You said you had something you wanted to tell me.’

Nerves had suddenly clutched at her throat as if someone had placed their hands there and were squeezing all the breath from her body. Emma nodded, slipped her coat off, perched on the edge of the sofa and took the drink from him, although she noticed that he didn’t pick up a glass himself.

It had been a long time since she’d drunk champagne and its sudden heady rush reminded her that she hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast. She felt dizzy. Weakened by his proximity and the way that he was looking at her. So tell him .

‘Vincenzo…this is very difficult.’

He sat down beside her. He could see her trembling and his lips curved into an arrogant smile. Had an earlier taste of his kisses reminded her just what she’d been missing? She really did want him. ‘Is it?’ he questioned, with soft arrogance.

Taking the half-drunk glass from her unprotesting fingers and putting it down on a table, he ran a thoughtful finger along the too-severe jut of her collar-bone, feeling her shiver beneath his touch. ‘It’s only difficult if we make it so. If you try and dress it up to be something it isn’t. Why not just admit that we’re still physically attracted to one another and that we both want this?’

Emma stared at him in rapidly escalating horror. He thought…he really did think she’d come back to strike the deal—a quick divorce in exchange for a night of sex. ‘That wasn’t what I meant.’

But Vincenzo wasn’t listening. He was hungry for her, transfixed by the way her rapid breathing was making her breasts rise and fall—and he was feeling more fired up than he could remember feeling since that last time he’d made love to her. His mouth hardened. Or, rather, had sex with her. There had been no love involved in that last frantic coming together that day in Rome. Maybe there never had been. Maybe thunderbolts were merely the indiscriminate strikings of lust.

‘I don’t care,’ he said deliberately. ‘In fact, I don’t care about anything—only this.’

His mouth came down on hers—a slow, drugging kiss with all the passion he’d displayed earlier in his offices, but this time there was a difference. This time they were not on his territory with the possibility that his assistant might wiggle her way in at any moment. And this time Emma knew that she was beaten—in every way. In a few minutes’ time she was going to tell Vincenzo something which would change his life irrevocably.

She was going to have to learn to live with his anger and the contempt she knew deep down that he was keeping on ice because at this moment he wanted her. And didn’t she want him, too? If she was being honest, then she had never really stopped wanting him. So why couldn’t she have this one last time before all the recriminations started? One last taste of bliss before the dark clouds descended.

‘Vincenzo,’ she groaned as she reached up to cling onto his broad shoulders and felt their muscular power. ‘Oh, Vincenzo .’

He closed his mind to the memories stirred up by her breathless words, instead pulling her closer into his arms, feeling her petite frame trembling beneath his touch and the soft, silken spill of her hair as it brushed against his cheek. The fierce throbbing at his groin was setting him on fire, and he kissed her more thoroughly than he could ever remember kissing anyone before—his lips exploring hers as if he couldn’t bear to tear his mouth away. What was it that she did to him?

‘Touch me!’ he urged huskily. ‘Touch me the way you used to.’

The faint sense of vulnerability in his deep voice was almost too much to bear—as intoxicating as his shuddered entreaty—or was Emma just imagining that? Hearing what she wanted to hear. But either way, she was in too deep to want to do anything other than what he wanted—and she ran her hands luxuriously down over his chest, feeling the roughness of hair beneath the fine silk of his shirt.

‘Like that?’ she whispered.

‘ Piu ! ’

‘More?’

‘ Sì ! More. Much more.’

Her fingers whispered down to his groin, where he was unashamedly aroused, and he bit out a remark which sounded like some Sicilian curse, and she thought that it probably was. As if he despised being in thrall to his senses like this, even while his body revelled in it. ‘Like this?’

‘ Sì , exactly like that. Ah, Emma,’ he groaned. Pale witch of a woman! Experimentally, he ran his hands over her body—this body he knew so well—as if he were feeling it for the first time. And maybe he was. He frowned. It felt different. Not only a diminishment of flesh, but her breasts seemed to be a different shape, too—or at least as much as he could tell while she was still covered up. He cupped one and let his thumb graze across it.

‘Take this damned dress off,’ he instructed.

But even in the midst of her body’s heated clamour, Emma was assailed by nerves. Surely he wasn’t expecting her to leap up and start stripping off for him—the way she might once have done when they were newly married? In view of their situation wouldn’t that be impossible? Why, she would feel as if he was buying her. And isn’t he ? jeered the mocking voice of her conscience. Isn’t he ?

But Emma closed her ears and her mind to the uncomfortable taunt and licked her dry lips. ‘You…you take it off.’

‘If you insist,’ he murmured.

He was good at that, of course. He must have removed a million dresses in his time. And how many other women had he undressed since the last time she’d been in his arms? wondered Emma painfully as he peeled the cheap little garment from her body, letting it fall disdainfully to the floor.

As he moved away from her his black eyes scorched over her like a diabolical laser beam. ‘Let me look at you.’

She wanted to shrink her arms over her chest and bunch her knees up to hide from the inevitable critical assessment of her scrawny body and her plain underwear, and her…

‘ Tights ! ’ he bit out derisively. ‘Since when did you start wearing tights?’

Since she stopped being a billionaire’s possession, that was when. Maybe her estranged husband didn’t realise that sliding into silk stockings and suspender belt wasn’t exactly compatible with getting up at the crack of dawn to feed a baby.

The thought of the baby and what she was going to have to tell Vincenzo was enough to make Emma freeze momentarily—to want to call a halt to it and tell him that this was a fruitless exercise. But by now he was tugging the tights down over her ankles and off her toes and burying his head into the apex of her thighs—kissing her there, over her plain cotton panties, until she was wriggling impatiently, wanting him with a fierce desire which was almost unbearable.