to escape she kissed him back, using her teeth and her tongue and her lips as if this was the last kiss she would ever have.
The passion that rumbled through her was a scary, out of control entity. It was a wild primitive side of herself she was terrified of letting loose but there was nothing she could do to restrain it. Desire streaked along her veins like a river of fire, making her flesh feel vigorously alive.
His hot breath and his sexy coffee-scented saliva mingled with hers as his mouth devoured hers with primal purpose. The faintly musky and erotic scent of arousal haunted the air. Goose bumps of pleasure prickled out over her skin as his tongue tangled with hers, driving deeper into her mouth, making her whimper breathlessly in pleasure.
One of his hard thighs came between hers, rubbing against her intimately, ruthlessly letting her know what he could do to her with just a single stroke of hard male muscle against her throbbing need. She gasped as she felt the tingling of her inner core, the exquisite tightening of her flesh, the greedy desperate little ache of her tissues that were already wet and weeping with want.
But then he suddenly pulled back from her with a muttered imprecation, putting the width of the lift between them. He swiped the back of his hand across his mouth and then frowned when he saw a small smear of blood on his tanned skin.
His eyes met hers, his expression dark and tight with self-disgust. ‘I’m sorry.’ He grimaced as if it physically pained him to say the words. ‘That was unforgivable.’
Lottie tentatively passed the tip of her tongue over the tiny split in her lower lip. She saw him follow the movement with his gaze, saw the convulsive rise and fall of his throat that signalled his regret even more powerfully than his gruff apology.
But she wasn’t quite ready to forgive him.
Not for kissing her so soundly. But for demonstrating how pathetically weak her resolve was against his practised seduction techniques.
Resolve? Ha! What resolve? Armour smar-mour. Going into battle with him was like going into a fencing match with a soggy noodle instead of a sword.
Pathetic.
She was pathetic.
The lift doors opening gave her the perfect exit cue.
Lottie turned and walked out with her back stiff and her shoulders neatly aligned, her head at an angle even her overly strict childhood deportment tutor would have been proud of.
It would have been a textbook I’m-having-the-last-word-by-saying-nothing exit if she hadn’t stumbled over the carpet on the way out.
LUCCA RIPPED YET another piece of paper off his sketchpad and scrunching it savagely into a ball, threw it at the wall. It bounced off and landed next to the pyramid of sketches he’d tossed there over the course of the evening.
For the first time in his life he couldn’t get into the zone. Couldn’t centre. Couldn’t anchor down.
Drawing was the music of his soul but tonight the band had packed up and left. Throughout his life, whatever emotions he grappled with, whatever demons he wrestled, whatever ghosts he avoided, he did it with pencil or paintbrush. It was his way of purging himself of every foul feeling festering inside him. The meticulous concentration of miniature work calmed him. Whether he was doing the preliminary sketch, or painting with one of his finest brushes while he worked under a large magnifying glass, the painstaking process calmed him like a lullaby does a fractious child.
But not tonight.
He was angry. Angry at himself. Angry for allowing his control to slip.
Lottie had needled him and instead of laughing it off in his usual I-don’t-give-a-damn manner he had reacted. Let her see a side of him he allowed no one to see.
Her little dig about him sponging off his family’s money seriously annoyed him. Who was she to talk? What about all the silver spoons she’d been fed with over the years? It wasn’t as if she had a big career path all mapped out. She lived her life through other people. Planning their events for them. She had no events of her own.
He had a right to his family’s money. The security of wealth made up for the emotional wasteland of his childhood. The loneliness he had suffered. The shame and hurt of not having a mother who had loved him and his siblings enough to stick around. The wretched disappointment when yet another important event at school ended without either of his parents showing up. He would look at all the other children with their proud and indulgent parents sitting in the school auditorium during a formal assembly or awards night or on the sports field. He would search that sea of beaming faces, hoping for a glimpse of his mother, desperately trying to match a face to the Laurent’s painting that hung at Chatsfield House. He would think it each and every time, even though he had no hooks to hang his hopes on: maybe this would be the day his mother would return. She would come to see him and Orsino. To cheer them on, to be proud of them, to show she still cared about them. His hopes would mushroom up in his chest until he could barely breathe. But then, like a sharp pin piercing the thin skin of a balloon, his hopes would deflate—flat, useless, empty.
He hadn’t made the most of his schooling. He had acted out his frustration, kicked back at authority, deliberately sabotaged his academic potential as a way of punishing his parents for not caring enough to show even a modicum of interest.
He had been lucky to have Orsino, but a twin was not a parent, and nor were older siblings. Antonio and Lucilla, his eldest brother and sister, had filled in where they could, but like Nicolo, and Franco, the next brothers in line, they had issues of their own to deal with.
And then there was Cara, the baby of the family, who had no memory of their mother at all.
Lucca swore as he dragged his hand over his face. He hated thinking about his family. He hated thinking. It stirred up emotions he had long ago buried, shining a bright light on the dark shadows of his hurt. The illumination of his pain made him feel physically ill. He could feel it now … the dead feeling in his muscles, the lethargy that dragged at his limbs. The tightness across his forehead, as if his eyes were being pulled back in their sockets by hot metal wires.
He picked up his phone, scrolled past another couple of missed calls from his brother, but instead of returning the call or distracting himself with social media he found himself scrolling through his photo file instead. He came to the photo of Lottie in the palace gardens. The light had caught the top of her tawny head, dividing her hair into segments like skeins of spun gold. Her skin looked as pure as cream with just a hint of dusky rose on her cheek that was facing the camera. She looked young and innocent, untouched, unsullied by the stain of twenty-first-century humanity.
He picked up a new pencil and turned over a fresh sheet on his sketchpad and started drawing….
Lottie had been fine about spending the night alone. Perfectly fine. Anyway, it had been exhausting doing loads and loads of shopping. It had been enormously liberating to wander about without a bodyguard, especially since no press had discovered her. With Lucca’s cutting remark about her goody-two-shoes personality still ringing in her ears she had bought outfit after outfit in a range of colours and styles just to prove she wasn’t half the coward he thought she was. She couldn’t wait to see his face when he saw her dressed in hot pink and wearing
