Lynne Graham - Dark Angel

‘My behaviour? After what I’ve come through, I’m not prepared to swallow your insults.’ As she spoke, scorching anger had flamed in Luciano’s intent scrutiny and his lean, strong face was rigid. ‘So stop right there and think very hard about what you’re about to say to me. In fact I think you ought to sleep on it!’

Kerry gave him an even more perplexed look. ‘Sleep…on it?’

‘Your time’s up. I have a meeting to attend and I see no reason why other people should be kept waiting on your behalf,’ Luciano asserted with acerbic bite. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow morning at eleven.’

‘You can’t expect me to come back here again tomorrow!’ Kerry argued in disbelief.

‘You should’ve been on time this afternoon.’

Kerry jumped to her feet. ‘For goodness’ sake, I have a flight booked home this evening!’

‘Then you have a problem. And do think very carefully about what you plan to tell me tomorrow because you won’t get a second chance to spill the beans.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean? Hasn’t anything I’ve said today made the slightest impression on you?’ Kerry pressed in dismay.

‘Nothing,’ Luciano admitted.

At that uncompromising confirmation, her heart sank. Recognising that she had no choice whatsoever but to meet his demand that she return the next day, Kerry dug into her bag to remove the file and walked over to set it on his desk. ‘Then at least look at my business plan for Ballybawn before I come back…that is sticking to the issue and practical and should be much more your style.’

‘Kerry…one final word of advice.’ Luciano shot her a grim look of incredulity. ‘The very last thing I’m likely to be interested in is your business plan for a property that will soon be mine!’

A sense of desperation surged up so hard and fast in Kerry that it made her feel light-headed. She had got nowhere with him but then, she dimly recognised, she was not firing on all cylinders, was she?

‘I can’t quite believe that I’m here with you,’ she muttered out loud, belatedly recognising her own maddening sense of dislocation throughout their meeting. ‘It doesn’t feel real.’

Smouldering golden eyes rested on her delicate features. Not a single reference had she made to his imprisonment for a crime he had not committed. Not a single word of even insincere regret had she proffered. A story-book princess in a fairy-tale tower could not have been more detached from the hard realities of his recent past.

‘I can make it feel real,’ Luciano murmured silkily, snapping his hands over hers and drawing her close before she could even guess his intention.

‘What are you d-doing?’ Every skin cell in Kerry’s body leapt in shock as he used his strong hands to clamp her to his lean, muscular frame. Her heart felt as though it was about to burst right out of her chest.

‘Making it feel real, cara mia.’ A hard, slashing smile on his lean, dark face, Luciano looked down at her, the lush black screen of his lashes merely accentuating the fiery gold challenge of his gaze. ‘When was I ever in your radius this long without touching you?’

With those words he set free a dozen evocative memories that she never, ever allowed herself to consciously think about. In the act of bracing her hands against his sleeves to break his hold on her, Kerry met his eyes and intimate images bombarded her without mercy: sunlight on her skin, Luciano in her arms, the potent allurement of him, the wildness of her own longing and the soaring belief that she was the luckiest woman in the world.

He took her soft pink mouth in a hard, deep kiss. Faster than the speed of light, her own body reacted to the surge of heat that flared in her pelvis. Her head swam, her knees shook. She could no more have halted the chain reaction of her own desire than she could have pulled back from him. More primitive reactions had taken over, making her push herself into contact with the hard muscularity of his lithe, powerful frame. A startled whimper of burning excitement broke in her throat as his tongue ravished the tender interior of her mouth.

Luciano set her back from him. Adrenalin on full charge, he was on a complete high. At that moment, it didn’t matter that the fierce ache of his own sexual hunger was actual pain. He was getting too big a kick out of watching her stumble back from him like a blind woman to steady herself on the chair back and he was revelling in the shell-shocked look on her face. Had the entire range of his ancestors crowed in triumph with him from the heavens he would not have been surprised, for never had his Sicilian genes been more in the ascendant.

‘I see you haven’t lost your taste for me,’ Luciano murmured in husky provocation.

Kerry flinched as though he had doused her with a bucket of cold water. Paper-pale from the aftermath of her own degrading response to him, she hovered, stricken blue eyes locked to him. Bitterly aware as she was of the terrible pain that he had already caused her, her temper exploded. She slapped him hard enough to numb her hand and make her wrist ache.

‘You bastard!’ she condemned. ‘I h-hate you!’

Luciano did not even wince and, as Kerry watched the marks of her own fingers flare up red over his cheekbone, she went into deeper shock at her own behaviour. Nothing he had said excused her violence and never before had she lost control to the extent that she had struck someone else. Blinking in shaken turmoil, appalled that she had let herself down to that extent, she muttered a harried apology.

Luciano surveyed her with lethal golden eyes and an unnerving degree of impassive cool, for he was simply chalking up one more score to be settled. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow…and don’t be late this time.’

As the door closed on Kerry’s hurried departure, a sardonic smile of intense satisfaction lit Luciano’s lean, strong features. She had lost her head. She was breaking up. He would find out what he needed to know tomorrow. And then? He finally understood why no other woman had yet been able to excite his interest. He still wanted her. Why? Had five years shut away from a world that had moved on without him left him trapped in time? In one sense, he acknowledged the truth of that. But he also thought his own urges were a lot more basic. Desire and revenge made an intoxicating combination. He hated her but he still burned to have her under him, to have those long, perfect legs wrapped round him, hear her cry out his name, learn the pleasure that he could give her…before he took it away again.

Outside the impressive building that housed da Valenza Technology, Kerry came to a sudden halt on the acknowledgement that she did not even know where she was going.

Stepping back from the milling crowds on the pavement, she attempted to still her jangling nerves. It did not help her to appreciate that she had made a complete hash of her meeting with Luciano. That kiss followed by that slap. Stupid…stupid…stupid, she told herself angrily as she noticed a café on the other side of the street and headed for the crossing.

He had accused her of trying to ignore the ‘personal dimension’ but what else could he have expected from her? Compassion? Forgiveness? Understanding? The anguish and self-blame that his infidelity had inflicted would live with her until the day she died. Just when she had been within reach of finally believing that she was someone of value, he had dashed her down lower than ever before.

The seeds of her difficult relationship with her stepsister, Rochelle, had been sown right back in childhood, Kerry acknowledged heavily. Within months of divorcing Carrie, her mother, her father had remarried. His second wife, Pamela Bailey, had been a widow with two young children. However, Harold Linwood had made no attempt to remove his four-year-old daughter from the care of her Irish grandparents. In fact, it had been six years before he thought better of that arrangement and finally came to Ireland to take Kerry back to England and into his own home.