looked at him, stunned. ‘You bastard,’ she said softly.
Cesare’s blood heated with an inevitable sense of triumph—because, in a way, wasn’t this exactly what he had wanted all along? For the precarious veneer of civility which had existed between them to be smashed by a simple word of contempt—leaving him free to give in to what he had wanted to do from the moment he’d first laid eyes on her again. And everyone knew that conflict made the best aphrodisiac in the world.
‘Is that what I am?’ he questioned as he walked towards her. Her eyes were filled with fury—and something else, too—or were they just mirroring what was in his? An unbearable hunger he had only just realised had been building away inside him all these years.
‘Then maybe I’d better start behaving like one.’ And with one unequivocal gesture he pulled her to her feet and into his arms.
She saw it coming—of course she did—but the pressure of his arms and the heat of his body drove everything from her mind—other than how much she had dreamed about this over the years, despite all her best efforts to suppress it. Sometimes in the middle of the cruel and indiscriminate night she had awoken to relive the achingly unfulfilled pleasure of his kiss—as someone stranded in the desert might remember how a glass of cool water tasted.
‘Bastard!’ she said again, but it came out on a shuddering breath of pleasure as he splayed his fingers possessively over her back. And this time something had changed. She was no longer eighteen years old, with a watchful mother lurking around in the house and a man who almost didn’t trust himself to touch her for fear that he would lose control. He was certainly trusting himself to touch her now.
She felt her knees weakening, so that instead of wrenching herself away from him she sank inexorably against him. It felt as if every taut muscle and sinew was imprinted against her. A body like rock and skin like silk—when had she learned to find that particular combination so utterly irresistible?
‘Damn you,’ she managed indistinctly. ‘Oh, damn you, Cesare di Arcangelo!’
‘But you don’t want to damn me,’ he taunted.
‘Yes, I do,’ she returned, and wondered how her voice could sound so reedy.
His gaze raked over her face and read the stark hunger in the emerald brilliance of her eyes. ‘You want this,’ he grated harshly. ‘We both want this.’
She told herself she would have denied it—but she would never know. Because the answer she had begun falteringly to frame was obliterated by the heady power of his kiss as he drove his mouth down hard on hers. And was this so very wrong? To give in to something it had nearly killed them to deny themselves in the past?
Hard and punishingly, he plundered her lips—and never had a kiss so overwhelmed him, leaving him weak and dizzy, like a man who had dragged himself out of the water after swimming too long.
Was that groan his? And that sigh—was that his too?
But even while his big body shuddered with unstoppable desire his response angered him. Which buttons did she always press which so weakened him—he, a man who neither needed nor wanted anyone? His anger transmuted itself into a desire to show her exactly that. To give her a coldly efficient demonstration of his sexual powers.
He dragged his mouth away from hers and brushed it over her neck. Her head tipped back as he did so, and the ponytail of her fiery hair dangled behind her. He wrapped it around his wrist like a bright, silken rope. His other hand reached for her breast, splaying possessively over the silk-covered curve and feeling the nipple peak and harden beneath his questing fingers.
‘Cesare!’ she cried.
‘What is it, cara? Is that good?’
‘It’s…It’s…Oh, Cesare.’ She wanted to call him darling—her darling—her sweet and wonderful and beautiful darling—Cesare. But he wasn’t her darling, was he? Not any more. He was just a proud and angry man who was setting her on fire with the mastery of his touch.
‘I should have done this years ago,’ he ground out, and pushed her back against the table, brushing aside all the papers and sliding her bottom onto the cleared space, scarcely aware of what he was doing, only that he was being driven on by a power greater than himself. ‘And then I could have rid myself of your face. Rid myself of your pale, beautiful body. Taken the memory of you and screwed it up into a tiny ball and tossed it onto the fire.’
That didn’t sound like affection—it sounded like the very opposite. Almost as if he despised her. Resented her. It should have killed her desire stone-dead—so why was it only escalating? ‘Maybe you should—’
‘Should what?’
‘Stop what you’re doing,’ she breathed.
‘But you don’t want me to stop, do you?’
‘Cesare—’
‘Do you? You would kill me if I stopped, wouldn’t you, my haunting green-eyed witch? You would rake those talons down over my bare back and draw blood, and then you would suck it off, like a vampire.’
‘Yes! No!’ No—no, of course she didn’t want him to stop, and the visual imagery of his words almost made her faint. He was right. She had wanted this to happen since for ever, and even before that. ‘Do it,’ she whispered. ‘Do it and get it over with. And then leave me with the peace that you so obviously crave, too.’
‘Oh, don’t worry,’ he vowed furiously. ‘I intend to.’
The skirt was tricky, but there wasn’t a skirt in the world which would have defeated Cesare di Arcangelo. Never had his experienced hands trembled so much. He rucked it up over her knees, and then further still, to reveal hold-up stockings clinging to pale thighs, and he sucked in a ragged breath, his resolve almost leaving him, but not quite.
Now he could see the fine triangle of lace which hinted at the soft red-gold tangle of hair beneath, and he touched her there with ruthless precision—lightly grazing his finger against her moist heat so that she cried out.
‘Shut up!’ he bit out. ‘We don’t want any of the secretaries coming in. There is only going to be one woman coming, and it is going to be you, my beauty.’
‘Oh, Cesare,’ she whispered helplessly.
He skated his fingers over the cool silk of her inner thigh and she writhed restlessly, impatiently—Cesare knew then that he had her completely in his power, but that he must use that power wisely.
For once he gave her the orgasm her body was so badly craving might she not just turn around and tell him to go to hell?
His fingers stilled and she groaned.
Or would it make her more compliant if he satisfied her now?
He needed her co-operation just as badly as he wanted to have sex with her if his scheme were to succeed. Wouldn’t leaving her wanting him more make her much more acquiescent to his wishes? For hunger was one of life’s great motivators, and sexual hunger the most powerful of all…
He thought of all the times he had pulled back from the brink that long, hot summer, and it gave him the strength to resist pulling her panties right
