he make you feel like this, cara?’ he grated with electric timing across the erect tip of one pouting nipple. ‘Can he send you this far, this fast?’ he demanded as his fingers, so excruciatingly knowing, slid a delicate caress over her sex.
She shuddered, moaned again, flexed and unflexed muscles that were moving to their own rhythm. ‘Vito,’ she breathed, as if her very life depended on her saying that name.
‘Yes,’ he hissed. ‘Vito,’ he repeated in rough-toned satisfaction. ‘Who touches you—here—and you go up in flames for me.’
She went wild then. Three years of abstinence was no defence against what he could do for her. She moved for him, breathed for him, writhed and begged for him.
His laugh of black triumph accompanied the first deep penetrating thrust of his body. But Catherine was too busy exalting in the power of his passion to care that he seemed to be taunting her surrender. And as Vito gritted his teeth and began to ride her his eyes remained fixed on her shuttered eyelids, because he knew her so well and did not want to miss that moment when those eyelids flicked upwards just before she shot into violent orgasm.
Then let him see if she was shocked to find his dark face bearing down on her instead of her damned lover’s face! ‘Me,’ he muttered tautly as he grappled with his own soaring need to surrender. ‘Vito,’ he gritted.
Why? Because despite what he was telling himself the very last thing he needed right now was Catherine shattering his ego by expecting it to be another man making her feel this good!
So he repeated his name. ‘Vito, cara.’ And kept on repeating it with each powerful thrust of his powerful frame, ‘Vittorio—Adriano—Lucio—Giordani,’ in the most seductive accent ever created.
Her answering whimper caught him in mid-thrust. Her eyes flicked open. She looked straight at him. ‘Pidoccio,’ she said, then shot into a flailing orgasm.
They lay there afterwards, sweat-soaked, panting, utterly spent. He on his back, with his arm covering his face, she on her side, curled right away from him. ‘Louse,’ she whispered again—in English this time.
She was right and he was. So he didn’t deny it. ‘You are my wife,’ Vito stated flatly. ‘Our separation is now officially over. So take my advice and be careful, cara, who you dream about in future.’
That was all. Nothing else needed to be added to that. Catherine had unwittingly struck at the very centre of his pride when she’d mumbled mixed-up words about Marcus in her sleep. The experience just now had not been performed for mere sexual gratification’s sake, but in sheer revenge.
Naples was shimmering beneath a haze of heat that made Catherine glad they were taking the coast road towards Mergellina then on to Capo Posillipo, where most of the upper echelons of Neapolitan society had their residences.
Vito was driving them in an open-top red Mercedes Cabriolet that must be a recent buy judging by the newness of the cream leather. And driving alfresco like this beat air-conditioned luxury any day, to Catherine’s way of thinking. She could feel the breeze in her hair and the sun on her skin, and if it hadn’t been for the man beside her she would have been enjoying this. The views were every bit as spectacular as she’d remembered them to be. And Santo was safely strapped into the rear seat, happily singing away to himself in whichever language took his fancy.
The three of them must look the perfect family, she mused. But they weren’t.
In fact she and Vito had hardly swapped three words with each other since they got up this morning. He’d risen first, rolling out of the bed and striding off to the bathroom very early—but then he always had been an early riser. Catherine had stayed huddled where she was, listening until she’d heard Santo go down the stairs before she made any attempt to stir herself.
She’d needed her son as a buffer. Catherine freely acknowledged that. At least with Santo there she could try to behave with some normality. But Vito had been as withdrawn and reticent as she had been, as if his behaviour last night had pleased him as little as it had done Catherine.
‘… sunglasses in the glove compartment.’
Catching only the tail end of Vito’s blunt-edged comment brought her face automatically swinging around from the view to find him looking directly at her. Blinking uncomfortably, she turned quickly away again.
It was all right for him, she thought as she leant forward to open the door to the glove box, his eyes were already hidden behind silver-framed dark lenses, but he hadn’t been able to look at her before he’d put the darn things on!
Once through Mergellina the car began the serpentine climb on the Via Posillipo. As Catherine turned her attention to enjoying the spectacular view now unfolding beneath them, a flash of gold caught her eye.
It was Vito’s wedding ring, gleaming in the sunlight where his fingers were hooked loosely around the steering wheel. Glancing down at her lap, she saw her own slender white fingers suddenly looked distinctly bare. In what had been meant to be a dramatically expressive gesture she had left her rings behind when she left Vito all those years ago.
But now she shifted uncomfortably, a sudden wistfulness sending her thumbpad on a stroke of the empty space where her rings should be.
‘Do you want them back?’
Catherine jumped, severely jolted by the fact that he wasn’t only looking at her now, but was doing it enough to miss nothing!
‘It seems—practical,’ she said, using the same flat tone as he. ‘To avoid any—speculation. For Santo’s sake.’
For Santo’s sake. She grimaced at the weakness of her excuse, and even though she didn’t check she knew that Vito was grimacing too. Because they both knew that if she put her rings back on she would be doing it for her own sake.
Pride being another sin they were all victim to in different ways. And her pride wanted her to wear the traditional seal of office that stated clearly her position in Vito’s life. That way she could hold her head up and outface her critics—of which she expected to meet many—and feel no need to explain her arrival back to those people who probably believed their marriage had been dissolved long ago.
The car moved on up the hillside, and the higher it went the bigger the residential properties became and the more extensive and secluded became the land surrounding them. As they reached a pair of lattice iron gates that automatically swung open as they approached them, Catherine’s attention turned outwards again, her interest picking up as she viewed the familiar tree-lined approach to her old home and found herself watching breathlessly for the house itself to come into view.
The gardens were a delight of wide terraces, set out in typically Italian formality, with neat pathways and hedgerows and elegant stone steps leading down to the next terrace and so on. There were several tiny courtyard areas fashioned around tinkling fountains framed by neatly clipped box hedgerows of jasmine and bougainvillea that were a blaze of colour right now.
As they rounded a bend in the driveway the house suddenly came into view. The Villa Giordani had been standing here for centuries, being improved on and added to until it had become the most desired property in the area.
Bright white walls as thick as four feet in places stood guarding an inner sanctum. Good taste and an eye for beauty had always been present in the Giordani genes. There was no upper floor terrace exactly, but each
