smouldering golden eyes so intense in focus that she was rocked back on her heels. All the oxygen in the atmosphere seemed to have dried up and she parted her lips to snatch in air.
‘I have only one point to make. It wasn’t her I was seeing...it was you,’ he spelt out hoarsely, his brilliant eyes pinned to her with mesmerising force. ‘It was you I was picturing in that get-up.’
Disbelief assailed Belle and she flicked him a scornful upward glance of dismissal. ‘Like I’m going to believe that with a half-naked beauty cavorting in front of you!’ she derided.
‘Believe...’ Cristo urged in a roughened undertone that vibrated with assurance in the stillness. ‘When I’ve got a real woman like you, why would I want one with fewer curves than a coat hanger?’
Her mouth fell wide at that less than flattering description of the beautiful model. ‘Not your type?’
‘You’re my type,’ Cristo confided huskily. ‘The erotic image of you bountifully filling those little blue scraps of nothing turns me on fast and hard.’
A real woman? Belle almost laughed out loud at that label. After all, the rigorous dieting she had tried in her teen years had failed to hone an inch off the solid bone structure that gave her defiantly curvaceous hips and voluptuous breasts. Back then she would have given her right arm to be one of the more fashionable ‘skinny-minnies’ at school. But she was not fool enough as an adult to instantly dismiss the idea that some men actually preferred curves to more slender proportions. It simply hadn’t entered her head before that Cristo might be one of those men.
He brushed a straying curl from her cheek and tucked it behind her ear with a casual intimacy that unnerved her. It said that he had the right to touch her, a right she had already denied him. An alarm bell shrieked in her brain, warning her to back off and enforce her boundaries yet again. But he was close, so temptingly close that she could smell the evocative scent of cologne and masculine musk that he emanated. He smelt so unbelievably good to her that her senses swam and she felt light-headed. Her knees wobbled beneath her while warmth snaked down from the breasts straining below her camisole to the very core of her, leaving her feeling hot and achy and dissatisfied. Even staying still in that condition was a challenge.
He touched her face, a long tanned forefinger gently tracing the line of her jaw to the cupid’s bow above her upper lip while a thumb stroked the soft fullness of her lower lip. Belle trembled, scarcely able to breathe for the rush of excitement that had come out of nowhere at her. Her body raced up the scale in reaction, temperature rising, heart pounding, pulse hammering. Her lashes lowered to a languorous half-mast as she gazed up at him in helpless silence, for she had no words to describe what he was doing to her. He was so beautiful, so devastatingly beautiful that she hadn’t even blamed the models for concentrating their attention on him while they displayed their wares. Not only was he the buyer, but also a male so handsome that he made women stare while they struggled to comprehend what it was about those lean, darkly dazzling features that exercised such sinful power and magnetism over their sex. Belle didn’t know; she only knew that the minute she stopped looking at him, she needed to look again. It was a compulsion she couldn’t fight.
‘You can put on that blue set just for me,’ Cristo murmured hungrily, stunning dark eyes flaring wicked gold at that prospect.
‘In your dreams,’ Belle warned him without hesitation, thinking he would wait a very long time if he hoped to see her tricked out in provocative underwear for his benefit. Playing the temptress wasn’t her style and in her opinion he didn’t need the encouragement. That conviction in mind, she walked into the drawing room, where at least their conversation would be unheard by the staff.
‘Don’t tell me that you don’t have the same dream,’ Cristo chided, shifting in front of her to clamp his lean hands possessively to her hips.
Belle was about to hit him, push him away, stamp on his foot, loudly lodge a protest to physical contact of any kind. She really was going to do at least one of those things and then his mouth plunged down hungrily on hers and her hands spread against the hard, warm contours of his chest and slowly fisted into the fabric of his shirt as she fought herself and fought the craving he induced.
In that split second between her thinking and acting, his tongue snaked into her mouth to taste her and she was lost while he nipped and teased at her lips and delved deep. The hot, throbbing sensation between her legs rose in intensity until she was rocking her hips against his, wanting more, needing more with an urgency that unnerved her. She could feel the long, hard ridge of his arousal against her belly and their clothes were an obstruction she couldn’t bear, overwhelming physical hunger surging through her quivering body with a force she couldn’t withstand.
Cristo lifted his handsome head, eyes hot and bright with sexual heat, black hair tousled by the fingers she had dug into the luxuriant strands, an edge of colour accentuating his hard cheekbones. ‘Shall we take this upstairs?’ he murmured thickly.
No was on Belle’s lips but yes was in her heart because her body was drenched with treacherous longing for his. She took in a slow steadying breath and struggled to clear her head, fighting the wanting clawing at her with all her strength.
‘I want you...you want me, cara,’ Cristo said drily. ‘What’s the problem? Are you still suspicious about that model? Do you really think I’d be that crass?’
‘No,’ Belle conceded reluctantly, for she would have used that as an excuse had she been able to do so. Unfortunately, her brain was in free fall. He had spoken the truth: the attraction between them was explosive. Furthermore, had he not been strongly attracted to her in the first place, he probably wouldn’t have offered her marriage. Even so the bond that was being created between them solely on a physical level was too superficial for her to accept and she wanted more.
Cristo elevated a sleek black brow. ‘Then? Are you still judging me as if I’m my late father?’ he demanded impatiently. ‘Or is it something in your own past which makes you so suspicious of men?’
Belle stiffened. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about—’
‘I think you do. You watched Gaetano run rings round your mother and hated him for it,’ Cristo contended. ‘But I’m not him.’
Belle bridled and gritted her teeth. ‘I know that and I didn’t say you were.’
‘Why else would you accuse me of coming on to that model right in front of you?’ Cristo slung back, tension etched along the hard line of his cheekbones and the angle of his strong jawline. ‘What sort of a man would behave like that?’
‘I overreacted. I’m sorry.’ Belle turned her vibrant head away, guilt and mortification piercing her. There was a certain amount of truth to his condemnation. She did distrust men but not all men. During her years at university she had been hurt by boyfriends who were offended by her refusal to get straight into bed with them before she even got to know them. The same boys had deceived her with other girls and let her down but no more so than any of her friends, who had suffered similar wake-up calls from young men who wanted nothing more lasting from a woman than physical release.
‘If you want this marriage to work, this isn’t the way to go about it,’ Cristo delivered in a measured undertone.
‘You said honesty was the best policy,’ Belle reminded him, walking away a few steps and then turning back to face him, her lovely face flushed and tense. ‘Then I’ll be honest. For this to work for me, I want something more than just sex with you. I want us to get to know each other. You can’t build a relationship purely on sex.’
‘I’ve
