But she smiled brightly as she entered the shaded villa and shook hands with Gisella, the elderly housekeeper, and her weather-beaten husband, Pasquale, who was one of the estate’s gardeners. A lovely young woman with dark hair helped Gisella around the house and Darcy saw her blush when Renzo introduced her as Stefania. There was also a chef called Donato, who apparently flew in from Rome whenever Renzo was in residence. Donato was tanned, athletic, amazingly good-looking and almost certainly gay.
‘Lunch will be in an hour,’ he told them. ‘But sooner if you’re hungry?’
‘Oh, I think we can wait,’ said Renzo. He turned to Darcy. ‘Why don’t we take a quick look around while our bags are taken to our room?’
Darcy nodded, thinking how weird it felt to be deferred to like that—and to be introduced to his staff just like a real girlfriend. But then she reminded herself that this was only going to work if she didn’t allow herself to get carried away. She followed him outside, blinking a little as she took in the vastness of his estate and, although she was seeing only a fraction of it, her senses were instantly overloaded by the beauty of Vallombrosa. Honeybees flitted over purple spears of lavender, vying for space with brightly coloured butterflies. Little lizards basked on baked grey stone. The high walls surrounding the ancient house were covered with scrambling pink roses and stone arches framed the blue-green layers of the distant mountains beyond. Darcy wondered what it must be like growing up somewhere like here, instead of the greyness of the institution in the north of England, which had been the only place she’d ever really called home.
‘Like it?’ he questioned.
‘How could I not? It’s beautiful.’
‘You know, you’re pretty beautiful yourself,’ he said softly as he turned his head to look at her.
Remembering the way he’d snapped at her in the car, she wanted to resist him, but the light touch of his hand on her hip and brush of his fingers against her thighs made resistance impossible and Darcy was shaking with longing by the time they reached the shuttered dimness of his bedroom. It was a vast wood-beamed room but there was no time to take in her surroundings because he was pulling her into his arms, his lips brushing hungrily over hers and his fingers tangling themselves in her curls.
‘Renzo,’ she said unsteadily.
‘What?’
She licked her lips. ‘You know what.’
‘I think I do.’ His lips curved into a hard smile. ‘You want this?’
Sliding down the zip of her cotton dress, he peeled it away from her and she felt the rush of air against her skin as it pooled to the ground around her ankles. ‘Yes,’ she breathed. ‘That’s what I want.’
‘Do you know,’ he questioned as he unclipped her lacy bra and it joined the discarded dress, ‘how much I have been fantasising about you? About this?’
She nodded. ‘Me, too,’ she said softly, because the newness of the environment and the situation in which she found herself was making her feel almost shy in his presence.
But not for long. The beat of her heart and the heat of her blood soon overwhelmed her and had her fumbling for his belt, her fingers trembling with need. Very quickly she was naked and so was he—soft, shuttered light shading their bodies as he pushed her down onto the bed and levered his powerful form over hers. She gripped at the silken musculature of his broad shoulders as he slowly stroked his thumb over her clitoris. And she came right then—so quickly it was almost embarrassing. He laughed softly and eased himself into her wet heat and for a moment he was perfectly still.
‘Do you know how good that feels?’ he said as he began to move inside her.
She swallowed. ‘I’ve...I’ve got a pretty good idea.’
‘Oh, Darcy. It’s you,’ he groaned, his eyes closing. ‘Only you.’
He said the words like a ragged prayer or maybe a curse—but Darcy didn’t read anything into them because she knew exactly what he meant. She was the first and only woman with whom he hadn’t needed to wear a condom, because her virginity had elevated her to a different status from his other lovers—he’d told her that himself. He told her she was truly pure. He’d been fascinated to find a woman of twenty-four who’d never had a lover before and by her fervent reply when he’d asked if she ever wanted children.
‘Never!’
Her response must have been heartfelt enough to convince him because in a rare moment of confidence he told her he felt exactly the same. Soon afterwards he had casually suggested she might want to go on the pill and Darcy had eagerly agreed. She remembered the first time they’d left the condom off and how it had felt to have his naked skin against hers instead of ‘that damned rubber’—again, his words—between them. It had been...delicious. She had felt dangerously close to him and had needed to give herself a stern talking-to afterwards. She’d told herself that the powerful feelings she was experiencing were purely physical. Of course sex felt better without a condom—but it didn’t mean anything.
But now, in the dimness of his Tuscan bedroom, he was deep inside her. He was filling her and thrusting into her body and kissing her mouth until it throbbed and it felt so amazing that she could have cried. Did her low, moaning sigh break his rhythm? Was that why, with a deft movement, he turned her over so that she was on top of him, his black eyes capturing hers?
‘Ride me, cara,’ he murmured. ‘Ride me until you come again.’
She nodded as she tensed her thighs against his narrow hips because she liked this position. It gave her a rare feeling of power, to see Renzo lying underneath her—his eyes half-closed and his lips parted as she rocked back and forth.
She heard his groan and bent her head to kiss it quiet, though she was fairly sure that the walls of this ancient house were deep enough to absorb the age-old sounds of sex. He tangled his hands in her hair, digging his fingers into the wayward curls until pleasure—intense and unalterable—started spiralling up inside her. She came just before he did, gasping as he clasped her hips tightly and hearing him utter something urgent in Italian as his body bucked beneath her. She bent her head to his neck, hot breath panting against his skin until she’d recovered enough to peel herself away from him, before falling back against the mattress.
She looked at the dark beams above her head and the engraved glass lampshade, which looked as if it was as old as the house itself. Someone had put a small vase of scented roses by the window—the same roses which had been scrambling over the walls outside—and all the light in that shadowy room seemed to be centred on those pale pink petals.
‘Well,’ she said eventually. ‘That was some welcome.’
Deliberately, Renzo kept his eyes closed and his breathing steady because he didn’t want to talk. Not right now. He didn’t need to be told how good it was—that was a given—not when his mind was busy with the inevitable clamour of his thoughts.
He’d felt a complex mixture of stuff as he’d driven towards the house, knowing soon it would be under different ownership. A house which had been in his mother’s family for generations and which had had more than its fair share of heartbreak. Other people might have offloaded it years ago but pride had made him hold on to it, determined to replace bad memories with good ones, and to a large extent he’d succeeded. But you couldn’t live in the past. It was time to let the place go—to say goodbye to the last clinging
