Was he warning her off? What else could he possibly be doing?
CHAPTER THREE
‘HOLLY’S doing…what?’ Rio ground out with rampant incredulity.
‘Almost finished cleaning the kitchen floor, boss,’ Ezio repeated with reluctance. ‘She’s been dusting and scrubbing and polishing all day and, short of physically restraining her, there was nothing I could do about it. She’s got a lot of grit but she’s on the brink of a collapse—’
‘The kitchen floor…’ Rio seethed, striding through the door that led down to the basement where all the household utilities were situated. His mood was not improved when he went through the wrong door on the lower floor and found himself in some sort of boiler room because it had been a very long time since he had visited the kitchen quarters.
When he finally located his own kitchen, the first sight that met his eyes was Timmie strapped into a high chair, slumped over fast asleep, curly dark head down on the tray, a feeding cup dangling from one tiny hand. He looked rather like a miniature drunken sailor, his little legs and feet clad in white…tights? And what was that frilly thing round his almost non-existent neck? Dio mio, Timmie was wearing a little girl’s woollen dress with a lace collar! Rio was truly appalled by that discovery.
He strode round the protruding unit to gaze down the length of a kitchen that stretched more than forty feet in depth. He settled his outraged gaze on the female behind weaving from side to side as Holly knelt on the floor with her bucket and scrubbed like a Victorian housemaid. He stilled, attention entrapped by the wholly feminine fullness of that derrière, every line defined by the fine fabric shaping its delicious curves.
Without warning, an attack of such powerful lust assailed Rio that his every muscle clenched in shaken resistance. Four weeks without sex and he was turning into an animal, ready to jump anything female, he decided in even darker fury. His lean hands clenched into fists as he willed the throb of his aching sex to dwindle to manageable proportions.
‘Get the hell up off that floor!’ Rio launched with wrathful bite.
Dredged from her concentrated efforts to deny her exhaustion until she had completed her work, Holly swivelled round on her knees in fright, collided with the bucket and tipped it noisily over. Her soft mouth opening in dismay, she gasped strickenly, ‘Now look what you’ve made me do!’
‘How dare you come here and start cleaning my floors?’ Rio demanded with savage censure.
Very slowly, Holly picked herself up, the over-large green dress with its wide neckline lurching off one bare white shoulder. But that shade was incredible against that fair skin of hers, Rio noted before he registered that she was swaying and literally grey with pallor.
Holly focused on him, butterflies breaking loose in her tummy. Snatching in a stark breath, she met his stunning golden eyes and felt the burn of reaction deep down in her pelvis, an enervating sensation that made her weld her slender thighs together in fierce embarrassment. ‘I’m sorry, I thought—’
Rio strode through the grimy flood that had spilled from the bucket and lifted her off her feet before she fainted in front of him. ‘How could you be so foolish? Do you think I invited you here to slave for me?’
‘I only wanted to make myself useful…’ Holly drank in the scent of him that clung to the jacket beneath her cheekbone, her nostrils flaring with helpless eagerness on that fresh familiarity.
Holding her that close was doing nothing for Rio’s rampant arousal. He was furious with himself, furious with her. Lack of control was not a sensation he was accustomed to suffering around a woman. But he was hugely tempted to tell her that if she wanted to make herself useful he had a whole catalogue of undomestic distractions to offer, not one of which, he was ashamed to admit, would have been thwarted by a wet floor, a child within hearing distance or even a fire alarm. He had seen her susceptibility in her eyes, in the way she held her slender, shapely body and in the mood he was in, a don’t-give-a-damn-about-anything mood of intense bitterness, that awareness inflamed his libido even more.
Ezio was positioned by Timmie’s sleeping form when Rio strode for the kitchen exit. ‘Bring Timmie upstairs and get him out of that stupid dress,’ he instructed the older man.
‘I only put it on him to keep him warm until his own clothes dried. He doesn’t know it’s a dress,’ Holly protested. ‘It was all that was available—’
‘You could be damaging his sexual identity for life!’ Rio condemned fiercely.
‘Do you think so?’ she questioned, aghast, as Rio carried her into a lift that she had not known existed until that moment.
He set her down and hit the buttons, choosing not to wait for Ezio. The door buzzed shut. She slumped back against the cool wall. ‘The floor’s in a real mess now,’ she lamented. ‘I can’t leave it like that.’
‘Shut up.’ Rio closed his eyes and breathed in deep and slow. He had had one hell of a day, barring calls from Christabel, putting his social secretary in charge of cancelling the elaborate wedding arrangements, watching the slow ripple of awareness pass round his personal staff one by one, recognising the amazed speculation in the eyes of those too stupid to hide their curiosity. Rio Lombardi and Christabel Kent, the golden couple, had broken up. All his life he had been a private individual, who hated others to breach his reserve. Now he was a mass of raw emotion and seething bitterness and, to crown his intense sense of raging humiliation at being put in such a position, all he could think about was the wild, savage oblivion of sex!
Holly shut up while the silence charged up. Rio opened eyes as bright as golden sunlight and dazzled her. The atmosphere was fraught, full of vibrations that skimmed along her nerve-endings, filling her with the strangest excitement in spite of her weary bewilderment. He was smouldering like a powder keg, she registered. She had no idea why but she had never been so aware of the potent magnetism of powerful masculinity.
In fact, she finally admitted, she was so hopelessly attracted to Rio Lombardi she could barely think straight, and that was a major shock to her system and her knowledge of herself. Jeff had never made her tremble just by looking at her. Jeff had never made her crave his touch. So, doubtless her ex-boyfriend had had good reason to call her a ‘lousy lay’. That humiliating recollection from the past steadied her and cooled her as nothing else could have done and made her drop her eyes from Rio Lombardi’s lean, strong face in shame.
‘I’m sorry I spoke to you like that,’ Rio murmured curtly as he stood back for her to precede him out of the lift.
She nodded with a bowed head.
‘Go to bed and rest,’ Rio advised harshly, stopping dead on the threshold of her bedroom but going not one step further. ‘I’ll have a supper tray sent up.’
‘I’m not hungry,’ Holly whispered shakily, no longer able to look at him. She listened to him walk away, feeling the loss of his vibrant energy and despising herself for that sensitised awareness.
A bloke like Rio Lombardi would never look twice at her, which was just as well, she conceded dully. She was useless in bed. Frigid as a corpse. She stilled a shiver of revulsion at that unforgettable description of her less than adequate performance: Jeff had spelt out exactly why he had lost interest in her. She might not have enjoyed that single session of physical intimacy that had none-the-less resulted in Timmie’s conception, but Jeff had made it clear that he had enjoyed it even less. How could she have actually believed his drunken assertion that
