blinked and shaded her eyes against the brilliant sunlight. And found her guess had been right. But rather than laps her husband was slicing through the ocean with a powerful front crawl that ate up the distance between the raft that bobbed about a mile out and the beach.
She watched as he hit the shore and walked up the beach, water sluicing down over his washboard abs. The drool that formed in her mouth was swift and uncontrollable. As if having him so completely last night had done nothing to stem the urge she had for him.
He lifted a hand to swipe the water from his face. And saw her standing there.
A heart-meltingly sexy smile curved his mouth. He walked up the beach and came to stand below the balcony, a fully relaxed, content-looking Riccardo who turned her insides to mush.
“You coming down?”
A smile twisted her lips. “If you’ll come swimming with me. I’m sweating already.”
“We have fifteen minutes before breakfast is ready. Get your suit on and get down here.”
She slipped off her négligée and pulled on the fuchsia bikini she’d bought with Alex. She might have made the huge mistake of sleeping with Riccardo last night, but that didn’t mean she had to continue her foolish behavior today. She needed to focus on keeping her head. She bit her lip as she pulled on a short cotton dress over her bathing suit. So what was she doing, running down to swim with him? And what had he meant when he’d said, “This is not over. We are only getting started”?
It didn’t matter what he’d said! She swiped some sunscreen across her cheeks and nose. Riccardo was a lethal banned substance for her. Best to accept that last night had been inevitable between them, like a storm reaching its conclusion, and find a way to make it through the next six months without killing each other.
Hot sex wasn’t going to accomplish that.
A rational brain would.
Tell that to her hormones, she thought as she joined Riccardo on the tiny private beach in front of the villa, the sand as smooth as silk between her toes. Because the intensity of her husband’s dark gaze on her was making her overheating problem a virtual crisis.
“You’d better lose the dress,” he advised. “Nowhere down here to leave it.”
She darted a self-conscious glance around her. The bikini wasn’t French Riviera material but it was revealing enough. She would rather have just gotten in the water, but since there really wasn’t anywhere to leave her cover-up on the beach she walked up to the terrace, draped it over a chair and headed back down to him, self-conscious in her halter top bikini.
The smell of bacon wafted through the air. “Mrs. Adams is cooking?”
He nodded. “We thought we’d let you sleep in. You needed it.”
She walked toward him, ultra self-conscious in her halter top bikini.
Her husband took her in from beneath veiled lashes. “And here I thought we had declared a truce.”
She frowned. Looked down at herself. Pink. Her swimsuit was pink.
Heat filled her cheeks. “It was the only suit that didn’t make me look like an adult movie star.”
He reached for her, his fingers closing over her forearm. “Why go for modest when you look that good, cara?”
She sucked in a breath as he pulled her against his hard, dripping wet body. “Did you listen to a word I said last night?”
“Si. I am intent on desensitizing you.”
She pressed a hand against his chest to balance herself. “You can’t just wave your fairy wand and cure me, Riccardo. Anorexia is something I’ll carry with me for the rest of my life, even if I have it under control.”
“I know,” he said, bringing his lips down on hers as he swung her up in his arms. “But I’m going to do it anyway.”
She smiled at his arrogance. His lips were warm from the heat of the sun, his kiss as leisurely as the mood he seemed to be in, and she found she just didn’t have the willpower to fight him.
He walked into the sea, and the water was so warm it barely registered on her heated skin. Then he wrapped her legs around him so they floated on the buoyant sea.
“Riccardo...”
“What?”
“I—I don’t think this is appropriate.”
He gave her an amused look. “We’re married. What’s inappropriate about it?”
She focused her gaze on his Adam’s apple. “Last night was...amazing...but I think anymore of that is just going to complicate things between us.”
He lifted her chin with his fingers. “If you mean sex, Lilly, then I’m going to have to disagree. Sex breaks down the barriers between us, and if you think, now that we’re finally talking, I’m going to let you put them up again, you’re mistaken. By the end of this weekend there isn’t going to be anything I don’t know about you.”
She went rigid. “There isn’t anymore to say.”
He pressed his lips together. “How did you keep it from me? I never saw the signs.”
“My anorexia?”
He nodded.
She pressed her hands against his chest to put some distance between them, but he kept his arms firmly banded around her. “I was better when I met you. I’d gotten control over it. I’d spent my career practicing physiotherapy, learning how incredible the human body is—how strong it is—and how much more important it was to honor your body than do what I’d been doing to it.”
She swallowed hard. His gaze on her face was making her feel as if she was under a microscope.
“It started to get bad for me again after that first year, when our honeymoon with the media wore off and they made a game out of criticizing how I looked or what I wore.”
“Which they do with anyone who’s in the limelight like that,” he interjected.
“Yes. But for me it was harder. Anorexia isn’t something with a lot of outward signs. It’s insidious. I withdraw. I stop eating. It becomes impossible for me to look at my body objectively. Everything gets distorted.”
He frowned. “I thought it was a vanity thing. The need to look perfect.”
A rueful smile curved her mouth. “The need to not hate myself would be more accurate.”
His jaw hardened. “Was I really that impossible to talk to? Did I really demand that much perfection from you?”
“It comes with your life, Riccardo. It’s expected from those around you.”
His jaw hardened. “We could have made adjustments to our life to make things easier for you.”
She shook her head. “You’re going to
