the silken skin and the honed perfection of his torso. This time she knew exactly when he wanted her to part her legs—and although she knew now what to expect, the glorious intimacy of his first thrust still took her breath away.
Glancing up, she could see that the ebony eyes were slitted and opaque as he entered her, could see the play of muscles in his powerful shoulders as he moved inside her. His lips dipped to tease hers—brushing and biting and grazing—until she greedily raised her hands to pull his head down, hearing his soft laugh as he deepened the kiss. She revelled in the changing rhythm—the way his hands clamped around her waist so that he could draw her even closer—until she felt so full of him that there was only one way to release herself from this exquisite tension and that was to let go.
She cried out—a strange, broken little sound she scarcely recognised as her own voice—and almost immediately she heard his own ragged groan. Afterwards, she lay there for a warm age, wrapped in his arms—her head on his chest as she listened to the thundering of his heart as it grew steady and his hand stroked absently at her hair.
But Cassie felt shaken as she lay in the curve of his arms. She hadn’t realised that sex could make you feel so utterly vulnerable—even more vulnerable than she’d felt in that room with the security officers at Hudson’s. Or that it could bind you to a man—make you want to cling to him and never let him go.
He must have gone to sleep, for his hand stilled to lie on top of her head, and she risked turning slightly, her eyes drinking in the details of his face as if she was committing them to memory.
In sleep the rugged features were relaxed—his expression less stern. She studied the dark sweep of his lashes and the way his hard mouth had softened into a sensual pout. It suddenly occurred to her that the man he really was lay concealed behind the rather formidable mask he always wore. Would he ever let her see what lay beneath?
She was unprepared for his sudden awakening—the way those lashes parted to reveal the ebony gleam beneath.
Giancarlo stretched and gave a lazy yawn. ‘Eri persa nei tuoi pensieri,’ he murmured.
She pleated her brows in response. ‘What does that mean?’
‘That your thoughts were elsewhere.’
Cassie pushed the hair back off her face. ‘They were.’
‘Usually a danger sign where a woman is concerned,’ he observed drily.
‘I was thinking…’ She hesitated, because despite the intimacies they’d just shared there was something still a little intimidating about him. ‘That I don’t really know anything about you,’ she finished softly.
His index finger stroked from neck to nipple, his mouth curving as he registered her answering shiver. ‘Yes, you do,’ he contradicted silkily. ‘You know how to turn me on with your big violet eyes and your petal lips and your soft, firm curves. You’re learning a little more every time we make love. By the time you go home to Cornwall, you will have become a sleek and seasoned lover who will be able to captivate any man you choose.’
Cassie supposed that was a kind of compliment—the kind of thing a man would say to his temporary mistress—but it made her feel like nothing more than a body. Somebody without a mind of her own. ‘But I don’t know anything about your life, Giancarlo.’
Giancarlo let his hand drift down to her breast. Why did women always want to interrogate you—and at the most inappropriate times? Hadn’t he hoped that his little shop-girl would be docile when he wanted her to be? He sighed. ‘What do you want to know?’
‘Tell me how you ended up living in London.’
‘It’s a long story.’
‘Those are the best ones.’
In spite of himself, he smiled—his finger stilling on the puckering rosy flesh of her nipple. ‘You are very persistent, aren’t you?’
She bit her lip as she felt pleasure rippling from where he was touching her. Was he trying to distract her? ‘J-just interested.’
He looked into her flushed face. ‘I told you that I was Tuscan by birth?’
‘Mmm.’ Cassie nodded, snuggling a little closer to him. ‘What’s it like in Tuscany?’
The clean, fresh smell of her struck some long-hidden chord within him so that for once he allowed himself to think of the green hills and sun-washed landscape of home—even though he had ring-fenced his memories and put them out of bounds. Exiled himself from it in all the ways that he could—so that even on his rare, duty visits home he didn’t allow nostalgia or sentiment to lure him.
‘What’s it like? Well, it is very beautiful. In fact, some people say it’s the most beautiful place on earth.’
‘So why…why live here, and not there?’
‘It’s complicated.’ He wound a strand of blonde hair around his finger. ‘My brother lives there—and it’s a little too small for both of us.’
He had a brother. She felt as if she had just discovered a missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle. ‘What’s he like?’
‘We’re twins.’
‘Twins!’ She turned onto her tummy and looked at him. ‘Identical twins?’
‘Not really. Well, we…look the same,’ he said, and then gave a short laugh. ‘But no two men are identical, Cassandra—if you were a little more experienced, you’d know that.’
Cassie registered the darkness which underpinned his voice. ‘You had some sort of fall-out?’ she guessed softly.
Giancarlo looked into her eyes and suddenly had the strangest desire to tell her. Was it because pillow talk and secrets were the currency traditionally shared with a mistress—or because her place in his life was so temporary that telling her would have no impact on it? She didn’t mix in his circles and she never would. And hadn’t he buried the memory so deep that he was curious now to see what it would look like if he dragged it out into the cold and dispassionate light of day?
‘A fall-out? Yes, I guess you could say that.’
‘What happened?’
Giancarlo swallowed because the acid taste of betrayal could still catch him unawares. Even now. He stared at the ceiling. ‘It all started soon after the death of our parents. My mother died when I was twelve—my father five years earlier.’
‘That must have been very hard,’ said Cassie softly.
She had the kind of voice which soothed—which felt like balm on his troubled recall. ‘Yes. It was a lonely kind of childhood. Plenty of money but not much else.’
‘And who looked after you?’
‘Oh, we had a series of guardians—aristocratic and intellectual men appointed by the estate who were supposed to educate us, and who we used to take pleasure in outwitting.’ He shrugged his broad, naked shoulders. ‘We were pretty much a law unto ourselves. And of course—we were fiercely competitive. Life was a constant battle to each prove ourselves—maybe to compensate for the lack of parental guidance.’
His
