on a long table. A console table, she realized. They hadn’t even made it out of the living room.
She’d married someone her family hated and now she was having wild sex with him on a table. She ought to be ashamed—and yet she wasn’t. She was thrilled at the illicitness of their encounter.
He wasn’t a bad man, she told herself. He wanted what was best for the baby, the same as she did, and he’d flown wedding dresses in for her so she wouldn’t have to get married in something that she’d worn to lunch or shopping with Mama and Lucia. He’d tried to make sure she had something special. That didn’t make him good by a long shot, but it made him human at least.
She was still breathing hard when he pushed off her and turned to tuck himself away. A frisson of alarm crept through her then. They’d had sex and he was done. He would leave her while he went to work on his laptop, or maybe he’d leave the apartment and go into the city and not come back until she’d fallen asleep waiting for him to return.
He caught her gaze then and quirked an eyebrow. “I’m not leaving, Tina.”
She hated that he knew what she was thinking simply from looking at her—and yet she was relieved, too.
“I hope not,” she told him, pushing herself up on her elbows. “I was quite enjoying that.”
Nico’s gaze was sharp and hot as he smoothed her gown down before he helped her to stand. Her legs were wobbly and she swayed into him. He caught her close, his fingers burning into the exposed skin of her back.
His smile scorched her. “We definitely aren’t finished yet,” he told her, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear. “That was merely a prelude.”
Tina’s heart was still racing. “Some prelude.”
He kissed her. In spite of everything that had just happened, in spite of the fact she was spent, excitement blossomed in her belly, kindling like a flash fire.
“You haven’t seen anything yet,” he promised.
Nico lay in the dark and listened to the breathing of the woman beside him. She’d fallen into an exhausted sleep hours ago, but his mind wouldn’t quiet enough to let him do the same. His body was replete, drunk on sex and high on the endorphins a good release could bring—and yet, if she turned to him now and ran a soft hand over his thigh, he’d harden in an instant.
And that was what he didn’t quite understand. What was this nearly insatiable need for her?
Oh, he loved sex and women, and he’d been known to spend long nights making love to whichever woman had caught his fancy. That was not unusual in the least. Nor was the fact she was beside him in the bed. He didn’t mistake sex and sleeping for love, and he made sure the women he was with knew that.
He knew that some men left in the middle of the night, or made the woman leave, but what was the sense in that? If he woke up aroused, he wanted a soft female body in which to spend himself.
No, he didn’t leave in the middle of the night like a vampire, and he didn’t kick a woman out of bed until he tired of her. How quickly that happened depended entirely upon her.
The instant the games began—the jealousy, the pouting, the efforts to make him say that he was beginning to feel something more—she was gone.
But now he had a wife, and that wife intrigued him more than he could remember being intrigued in quite a while. His life, while full of beautiful women and all the finer things money could buy, had left him empty of late. More lonely than content, more restless than happy.
Tina, however, excited him again. He’d been so hot for her that he’d taken her on a table in the living room with the lights of Rome stretched out below. He should have made it more special for her, but he’d been unable to wait. She’d asked him not to ruin her dress—he hadn’t, but he’d damn sure creased it. After that first frantic coupling, he’d carried her to the bedroom and taken the time he should have taken initially. He’d explored her, aroused her, and satisfied her over and over.
He loved the sounds she made when she came, the way she said his name, her soft voice breaking at the end as if he were the one thing she needed in this world to survive. It was a plea, each and every time—and yet it wasn’t. He sensed there was something about her he could not touch, and it drove him crazy wondering what that was.
Did she purposely hold a part of herself back? Or was he imagining things?
He turned in the bed and slid a hand along her hip before pulling her into the curve of his body. She felt good there, and he lay beside her and just listened to her breathing.
Valentina D’Angeli. Valentina Gavretti, he corrected fiercely.
How was it that he lay here with Renzo’s little sister and the only thing he felt was protective? He should feel triumphant, as if he’d finally found the way to get beneath Renzo’s skin—but he didn’t.
She turned in his arms then, her hand coming to rest on his cheek. It made him feel fierce inside. If Renzo tried to take her away …
“Nico,” she sighed.
“Yes, cara?”
He could see her smile in the dark. “Nothing.”
His body was already reacting though he tried to think of something other than sex. But his penis was throbbing to life regardless. Sometimes it definitely had a will of its own. He did not doubt that women were right when they accused men of thinking with their genitalia.
He pushed a lock of curly hair out of her face. “Tell me something, Tina.”
“What’s that,” she asked sleepily, burrowing into him even more.
“I don’t understand how you were still a virgin.” He’d been thinking about it since she’d blasted back into his life. She was so passionate, so honest and open in her sexuality, that it didn’t make sense. She burned him up with her heat, and he craved more of the same—had since the first night he’d been with her.
She shrugged. “I never found anyone I wanted to be with.”
He’d never claimed to understand women’s minds, so he didn’t argue the point. To her, it made perfect sense. “Then why did you choose me?”
“Actually, I chose someone else,” she said, and he couldn’t stop the slice of jealousy that slammed through him. “But he smelled like garlic. You didn’t.”
Nico blinked. “You mean it came down to garlic?”
She nodded. “Yep. Garlic. One really shouldn’t eat garlic if one expects to seduce a woman.”
He couldn’t help but laugh at that. “Then I suppose I should be grateful I skipped the garlic.”
She tilted her head back on the pillow to look at him. He could feel the intensity of her gaze, even if he couldn’t actually see what was in her eyes in the dark. “Do you really mean that?”
Everything inside him grew still. He didn’t know what he meant, but he wanted to tell her not to read too much into it, though he knew that she already had. She was young and naive, at least as far as relationships went, and he
