his jaw bristly against her skin, and his thick eyelashes not hiding his shocked expression for once.
“Cristo, bella,” he whispered, touching his forehead to hers.
His nose rubbed against hers, a strange intimacy growing around them.
“Stefan,” she begged, desperate to flee, but yearning to feel that rough mouth against hers again. Desperate to be touched again, desperate to feel his muscles tense. “Don’t do this.”
His fingers crawled over her nape and into her hair, his gaze almost angry. “I can’t stop, Clio. Not now.”
He slanted his mouth over hers and dragged it across.
Fiery need burst across the seam of her lips and Clio shuddered all over.
With a curse that resounded in the air, Stefan tightened his grip until her scalp prickled. Buried his nose in the crook of her neck and breathed.
“You smell like sunshine and oranges, bella. Dio, you taste like...”
Clio didn’t know what else he said. All the fight left her as he found her mouth again and devoured it with little bites and nips. Stroked and tasted her lips as if she was a feast to be savored.
Kissed her as if there was nothing else he wanted to do, as if nothing but her total surrender would do.
And Clio surrendered. To him and even more, to the desire inside her, both freeing and binding.
Their bodies fused to each other as they crossed a line they shouldn’t have.
A kiss they could never undo because it already engulfed them.
* * *
A day later, Clio and he were due to leave for New York in a couple of hours and the chasm of need that the kiss had ripped open felt just as raw to Stefan.
He had only meant the kiss as an evasion.
But one taste of her lush, pink, trembling mouth, and he had been knocked in the gut. All of the fantasies he had spun around her as a raging twenty-year-old became intoxicating reality.
Prowling the carpeted interior of his suite, he stared at the video coverage of the kiss that was already being aired on every site that fed on his life, his mood slowly spiraling out of his control.
Just as his libido did by the memories of her warm mouth, the scent of her skin, of the way she had shuddered and moaned when he tangled his tongue with hers.
Watching their kiss shouldn’t have been the most erotic experience he had ever had. Exhaling a pent-up breath, he acknowledged it was.
Christian and Alessandra’s wedding and reception had gone on without an ugly visit from the media, thanks to his diversionary tactics. But there was a betrayed look in Clio’s eyes that pierced him when she met his gaze now.
Like he had crossed an imaginary boundary between them.
And the fact that he could think of nothing but baring her completely to him, of removing the fear and self-doubt that had flashed in her eyes and replacing it with liquid lust, proved her right.
It had been a long time since a kiss had turned him inside out with need.
A long time since anything had touched him.
But he would have preferred if it had been anyone but her.
The short clip was already up on most celebrity gossip websites and spreading like a virus. The rabid speculation had begun.
His features had been distinctive. So the media knew it was him.
What they hadn’t figured out yet was her identity. And they were going crazy trying to figure out who the new woman in his life was, angling to find out who else was on the guest list at Christian’s wedding.
The press had dubbed her Bianco’s Redhead, a name he was sure the redhead in question was going to dislike, if not despise.
He grabbed the remote just as Rocco, wearing the blackest scowl Stefan had ever seen, entered the suite without knocking.
His gaze turned to the plasma screen on the far wall seconds before Stefan turned it off. The silence grew heavy, almost stifling, as Rocco, his oldest friend, studied him.
“Whatever you want to say, don’t,” Stefan snarled, his hackles rising at his friend’s continued silence.
“All four of us have treated the world and the women in it as our playground for years, true,” Rocco said, cutting straight to the point, “but I always thought there was still a bit of honor left in all of us. First Christian with Lessie, and now you and Clio... Dio, didn’t you find anyone else to play with other than our oldest friend, Stefan?”
Stefan had had every intention of telling his friends the utter truth. But now, his friend’s well-meaning interference locked the words in his throat. Even as the short clip was sweeping the internet like wildfire for all the world to see, to actually dissect their kiss with Rocco, to reveal Clio’s confidence and their deal, felt too private.
Too intimate to be shared.
Which in itself should have rung all his internal alarms like a damn gong.
He ran the heel of his palm against his jaw, striving for a casual tone. One kiss and it was like Mount Etna had erupted.
“I’m not playing with her.”
“No? In a decade, I have not seen you make one meaningful connection with another person, much less a woman. And you always had a thing for her. Damn it, you cannot play with and then discard Clio like you—”
“Enough, Rocco,” he said through gritted teeth.
Leashing his temper by the skin of his teeth, because no way did he want to betray how much that kiss had affected him, Stefan smiled at Rocco. “Just because you have settled into marital bliss with Olivia doesn’t mean you can expect us all to change colors already, fratello. Clio...she is safe from me.”
Grinning, Rocco clapped him on the back. And once again, Stefan wondered at how well love and Olivia suited Rocco.
He had never seen his friend so happy and at peace.
“You know I had to—”
“Not needed, Rocco,” Stefan said.
Rocco looked at him as if he wanted to say something more. Instead, he embraced Stefan and bid him goodbye.
Pouring himself a drink, Stefan went to the balcony.
Olivia and Clio were seated at the outdoor café on the ground floor.
Instantly Stefan shifted to see Clio better. She wasn’t laughing like Olivia but a smile curved her mouth. And something loosened in his chest.
He was glad she was smiling again. She had lost that awful pallor, that stricken, lost look she had had when she had come to his suite.
As
