and unzipped him, carefully freed him—easing him out into the palm of her hand—and he moaned.
‘Shhh. I don’t want anyone to know what we’re doing.’
He found the fact that she had told him to be quiet unbearably erotic—almost as erotic as her kicking off her own tiny panties, pushing him down to the floor and then straddling him.
‘How’s that?’ she questioned disingenuously as she lowered herself down to sheath his silken steel column.
He shook his head, unable to speak, unable to do anything except helplessly lie there while she rode him. Oh, sweet heaven…
He began to cry out as sweet release seized him, and she lowered her head to capture his mouth, her lacecovered breasts covering him with their warm curves as she kissed him. And still she thrust her hips towards him, so that as his pleasure began to fade out her own orgasm swept her away, and she arched her body like a bow.
He caught her bottom and anchored himself to it, watching as she threw her head back and moaned—silky hair tumbling all the way down her back.
When it was over, they stayed exactly where they were—controlling their unsteady breathing, staring at one another in quiet disbelief.
‘What’s Italian for “wow!”?’ mumbled Sorcha.
‘It’s the same.’ He stroked his hand over her waist reflectively, and then lifted his arm to glance at his watch. ‘Better move, baby,’ he murmured, with the lightest of smacks on her bottom. ‘I have a phone call to make.’
‘Sure.’ Somehow Sorcha kept her face composed, even if his words made her feel like a discarded hooker.
But you shouldn’t start a no-strings office affair unless you could accept it for what it was.
Sex.
CHAPTER TEN
‘HOW about some coffee?’
Cesare looked up from the paperwork he’d been working his way through at his desk, and his eyes narrowed as they focussed on Sorcha.
‘What?’ he questioned, and rubbed at his temples.
‘Coffee,’ said Sorcha, wondering why she couldn’t get rid of the feeling that she just wanted to shake this whole situation to make it the same as it had been before he’d left for his long trip to the new factory, the States and Italy. But she couldn’t. And it wasn’t.
In the bittersweet days since he’d returned Sorcha thought he’d been distancing himself from her—despite the red-hot satisfaction of their sex-life. Was it just a kind of preparation for his eventual departure? Or was it just her paranoia?
Cesare stifled a yawn. He had worked late last night, after everyone else had gone home, and then done a conference call with LA. And since he’d arrived that morning he’d been ploughing through a pile of papers with Sorcha on the other side of the table until she had disappeared into the private cloakroom a few minutes ago.
Now she had reappeared, and it seemed that she had taken off her shoes and stockings. Cesare saw the glint in her shimmering green eyes and guessed from their hungry expression and from the way she was walking that her panties must have come off too.
She wasn’t just offering him coffee, that was for sure.
‘I’d love some,’ he replied blandly.
Sorcha frowned. ‘Coffee?’
He leaned back in his chair and studied her, rubbing his eyes. ‘That was what you were offering me, cara—unless my ears were mistaken.’
Giving him a slightly unsure smile, Sorcha dropped her shoes onto the carpet and walked over to the coffee machine, where she fiddled around and poured two espressos, then put them both on his desk.
‘Here you are.’
‘Thanks.’
She watched him pick his up and sip it, and frowned. She had thought that he might have telephoned her last night when he’d finished working. She had been willing to slip over to the hotel to see him—but he hadn’t phoned.
And she had deliberately arrived at the office early this morning—but he had sauntered in after Rupert, and there had been back-to-back meetings all day. All she’d been able to do was look at him with a kind of helpless longing and growing frustration.
She felt as if she was doing a balancing act the whole time—trying to appear cool and not look as if she was some desperado whose world was going to cave in after he’d gone.
But even she had her limits—and surely, as his lover, a few rights, too? She drew a deep breath. ‘So, are you going to tell me what’s wrong?’
‘Wrong?’ Cesare put his cup down, and now Sorcha could see the shadows beneath his eyes and a pang of guilt suddenly hit her. ‘Why should anything be wrong?’
‘I just thought…’ Her words tailed off as she read something in his eyes she didn’t recognise.
He stood up and came towards her.
‘What?’ he demanded. ‘You thought that something might be wrong because for once I didn’t leap up and start tearing at your clothes when you snapped your pretty little fingers?’
‘But I thought that’s what you like to do!’ Sorcha stared at him. ‘You’ve never complained before.’
‘Of course I haven’t!’ he said, in a voice of dangerous silk. ‘Because what man in his right mind would complain when a woman is constantly demanding mind-blowing, erotic, no-strings sex and demanding that he keep it secret?’
‘Presumably you have your reasons,’ she said coolly.
Cesare stared at her in frustration. It was the fantasy that most men dreamed of—and he was fulfilling every sweet, sensational second of it.
He had tried telling Maceo about it over dinner in Rome last week, and the photographer had told him that if he was really complaining he needed to see a psychiatrist, because no-strings relationships were the only ones which worked—and did he think Sorcha might be interested in doing more modelling? Cesare had swallowed a mouthful of wine and told his friend to go to hell.
Cesare studied Sorcha thoughtfully. ‘We never spend the whole night together—never sleep together,’ he observed.
‘That might be a bit of a giveaway, don’t you think?’ she asked. ‘Some bright spark like my mother or my brother might put two and two together and very cleverly come up with the answer of four!’
Cesare knitted his dark brows together. Maledica la donna! ‘And we never eat together,’ he observed.
‘That’s not true,’ she protested. ‘We often have a working lunch.’
Sure they did. Tongue sandwiches in a deserted lay-by.
‘And we had dinner with my family on Sunday—you know we did!’
‘Yes,
