froze. ‘I hurt you?’ She could see his shrewd green eyes deducing certain things she would have preferred him not to know.
‘It’s all right now...it’s been a while,’ she muttered dismissively, her face red and hot as fire.
Dante shifted his lean hips, sank slowly deeper and then withdrew and repeated the manoeuvre. A ripple of excitement gathered in her pelvis as her body clenched around him and he thrust deep with an appreciative groan. The delirious dark pleasure was engulfing her again by degrees, tightening her muscles, making her heart race, filling her with a flood of hunger. He slammed into her harder and faster, the all-consuming urgency of their entwined bodies enthralling her as another climax slowly, steadily began to build. The extremity of that orgasm when it came made her thrash and buck and cry out.
Afterwards, Topsy thought she would never move again because her body was in a blissful state of exhaustion. Dante dropped a kiss on the bridge of her nose and levered off her, releasing her from his weight.
‘Che diavolo! You’re bleeding!’ he exclaimed.
And there and then she almost died of mortification, startled eyes flying wide on his shocked expression as she sat up and saw the smudge of blood on her thigh. She burned red from head to toe and folded her arms round her knees. ‘It’s nothing to worry about.’
‘You were a virgin,’ Dante breathed in audible disbelief, reprogramming his every former assumption about her.
‘We don’t need to do a post-mortem on it,’ Topsy fielded.
‘You should have told me!’ Dante censured. ‘I could have made more of an occasion out of it. If I’d known I wouldn’t have taken you on a picnic rug in the woods.’
Embarrassed though she was, that had Topsy turning wondering eyes on him. ‘You don’t find it a turn-off?’
‘I think it’s the biggest turn-on I’ve ever had,’ Dante told her, his keen gaze studying her with fascination. ‘To know that at its most basic no other man has done what I’ve just done with you is extraordinarily exciting, gioia mia.’
In relief she leant forward and kissed him. He nibbled at her lower lip and then kissed her long and hard and before very long all talk ceased and they were making love again.
* * *
Topsy surfaced from a long much-needed nap to find that the sun was going down and she glanced at her watch in consternation. Dante was already dressed and the picnic packed away. ‘You should have wakened me,’ she complained.
‘You must’ve needed the rest.’
Shy of him now, she flipped off the edge of the rug he must have tossed over her while she slept and concentrated on retrieving her clothing and getting into it fast. She felt downright astonished by what had transpired between them and the raw passion that had engulfed them had rewritten all that she thought she knew about herself. She hadn’t known she had such a capacity for passion, indeed had often assumed she was more than a little cold in that department, for never before had she found it impossible to resist temptation. And Dante was the very essence of temptation on her terms. With him she was weak, she acknowledged. But was that necessarily a bad thing?
It was a fling, a little holiday fling, nothing more serious. Neither of them was looking for or expecting anything more and on that basis they were a good match. As he had pointed out, he wasn’t auditioning as potential husband material. And yet as she glanced at him when they reached the car again and he smiled, a feeling like trapped sunshine expanded inside her chest, making it feel tight. It was an infatuation, she told herself, responses heightened by the heat of the Italian sun and the taste of freedom she was enjoying. She was young and full of hormones, finally exploring a side of herself that had been on a leash for too long. What she was experiencing was normal, she reasoned frantically, not something she needed to worry about.
‘You’ve gone so quiet. I’m used to you chattering,’ Dante confided, shooting the car to a halt by the garages.
‘I’m making a mental list of all the things I have to check before the ball next week.’ Topsy hesitated and then forced herself to continue, ‘Don’t say anything about—’
‘Of course I won’t.’
Topsy’s tension level dropped a little. ‘If your mother or Vittore knew or guessed, it could make for an uncomfortable atmosphere,’ she warned him.
She scrambled out of the car in haste, desperate to have a shower and relocate her poise. At that moment she was as awkward as a clumsy teenager around him and it galled her.
‘Topsy...’ His voice halted her as she sped across the courtyard towards the servants’ entrance at the back of the castle.
Reluctantly, she turned, amber eyes welding to his lean, darkly handsome face and the sardonic expression he wore. ‘Yes?’
‘I have work to do as well. I’ll see you later,’ he told her smoothly.
Topsy fled, heart beating as fast as if she were sprinting. He could set her alight with one look, one word, even the rich accented timbre of his beautiful voice. It was as if she had succumbed to the worst possible addiction and the strength of it frightened her.
* * *
Dante walked into his study, a dark frown pleating his ebony brows. Topsy was always surprising him. Once he had realised just how inexperienced she was, he had feared she might be a little clingy—and he hated clingy women like poison—but she had taken off like a bat out of hell without even trying to instigate the expected fact-finding dialogue about where they were going and what they were doing. Her restraint had disconcerted him.
It was an affair, no big deal, he reflected impatiently, but the circumstances were not what he would’ve chosen. She was his mother’s employee and, just as he had always ensured that his relationship with his staff at the bank remained strictly above board, he would not have chosen to become intimately involved with anyone working for his family. But then that was before he met Topsy and before he enjoyed a session of amazingly vibrant and satisfying sex that had only left him craving more. There was always an exception to the rule and he could not remember when he had last craved more of a woman so soon after having her.
In retrospect he could barely believe that he had cherished such sordid suspicions of her relationship with his stepfather and with Mikhail Kusnirovich. He was more taken aback by the acknowledgement that he had become so cynical about women that he had automatically distrusted the evidence of his own eyes and had decided, on no very strong evidence, that Topsy was a promiscuous little schemer up to no good. Well, she certainly wasn’t promiscuous.
* * *
Topsy stood in the shower reliving his every touch and, with a frustrated groan, leant back against the cold tiled wall, angry with herself for being so susceptible. Where was her brain when she needed it? It was a physical infatuation, nothing more threatening and it would run its course soon enough.
Dante didn’t join them for dinner and she was guiltily relieved when she heard that he was dining with his old friend, Marco, one of the local doctors, but she was also a tad irritated that he hadn’t thought to tell her that he was going out. So, now was she trying to attach strings to him? He didn’t belong to her; she didn’t belong to him. Their lovemaking in the woods might never be repeated, she conceded, because it was perfectly possible that he might have decided that
