her fingers had clamped tight over the elegant lapels, crushing the expensive fabric ruinously as she clutched it to her like some sort of shield. Shock was setting in with a vengeance and she didn’t know how to cope with anything.
‘Are you OK?’
Idiota! Vito reproved himself furiously. Of course she was not OK! She had just almost drowned and now she was cold and probably in shock. What sun there had been earlier in the day was already fading rapidly, clouds gathering in the sky. Already some of those clouds were turning heavy grey and, if he was not mistaken, the storm that had been threatening all afternoon was now building up rapidly to breaking point.
And with the darkening of the skies had come a definite drop in temperature, a chill to the wind that had blown up. Instinctively he rubbed his own arms where the gooseflesh had already appeared. The damp jeans and T-shirt were cooling rapidly—and he wasn’t half as badly soaked as Emily.
‘Idiota!’ he muttered again and saw those big blue eyes widen in shock and apprehension as she took a stumbling step backwards, away from him. Immediately his conscience reproached him savagely. With her blonde hair darkened by the water and tangled around her face, her skin pale and her lips almost colourless, she looked like nothing so much as a half-drowned kitten, one he had just kicked out at, hard.
‘Not, not you—me’, he assured her hastily. ‘I should not be keeping you here talking when you’re soaked through to the skin. You need to get inside—get warm—change your clothes. We have to get you home—where are your car keys?’
‘Here…’ She pulled them from her pocket, where, luckily, she had obviously put them before her wild dance in the water. ‘But—but there’s a problem…’
‘There is?’
Vito had been turning away, heading for the promenade, but the comment and the shaky voice in which it was uttered brought him to an abrupt halt, swinging round to frown down at her again.
‘What sort of problem?’
For a second he thought she was going to keep silent. The way she huddled closer into his jacket, avoiding his eyes, seemed to indicate that. But then she bit down hard on her lower lip and lifted her gaze to look him straight in the face.
‘I—I don’t live locally.’
‘You don’t?’
Emily shook her head, sending cold drops of sea water flying from her pale hair. ‘I only meant to be here for the day—I was just passing through.’
No. His mind rebelled at the thought, rejecting it out of hand. That wasn’t going to happen. She wasn’t going to ‘pass through’, moving on and out of his life without a backward glance. He hadn’t met a woman who had stirred his senses so ferociously in a long time—if ever. He wasn’t going to just let her go without knowing what it would be like to take this instant, blazing attraction further. An attraction that she had felt too. He had sensed it in every inch of her body; felt it when she had trembled against him.
That hadn’t been from cold, but from the exact opposite. The burning heat of desire that he’d experienced had made him shake too, but with need, with a hunger that he had been barely able to control. Its force had been primitive enough to bring him almost to the point of flinging her down onto the sand and indulging in the raw, primal need that they were both enduring. Only the knowledge that they were in such a public place had forced him to rein in the fierce desire that had him in its grip.
He still felt that way. But seeing the way she huddled into his coat imposed a control over his actions that warred cruelly with the still burning desire.
‘But you have clothes in your car—something to change into…’
The words died on his tongue as she shook her head again.
‘I didn’t bring any with me. I—wasn’t thinking straight.’
‘Just passing through.’ Vito repeated her words automatically, his mind busy.
‘Just passing through,’ she echoed and shivered again as a drip of water tumbled from her fringe and landed on her nose.
The small response made up his mind for him.
‘Then you’ll have to come back with me,’ he declared, making it a statement of fact, not a suggestion. To him it was the only answer. There was no other way.
But Emily’s blonde head tilted to one side, blue eyes studying him warily. And there was a new expression in them now. One that had suddenly reminded him that she might be just a kitten—but even the smallest cat had very sharp claws.
‘Back where?’
‘To my flat—’
He waved a hand in the direction of the far side of the seafront, vaguely indicating the general area of the small apartment he was renting for this year.
‘You can have a shower, dry your clothes…’ He saw her reaction in the way her face changed, even before she spoke. ‘No?’
‘No…’ Her voice was low but firm.
‘And why the hell not?’
He couldn’t believe she was actually backing out of this. He had been so sure that it was what she wanted too—almost as much as he did. This wasn’t the same woman that he had held in his arms. The woman he had kissed.
Silently Vito cursed the fact that he had ever stopped kissing her—ever let her go. If he had just kept her in his arms, if he had clamped his lips to hers, sealed her mouth with his and carried her off the beach and down the road to his flat, then she would have gone without a word, he knew. The woman he had kissed had melted under his touch, yielding mindlessly and immediately, and he could have kept her that way—should have kept her that way. That woman would never have hesitated, never given him that wary, assessing stare. That woman would never have said no. He knew that without a doubt.
But he had let her go. He had given her a chance to pause and think and as a result she had drawn back. Something had changed her mind, stopped her from going with what she felt and making her act instead on careful, rational thought. And the heady, burning passion that had flared between them couldn’t survive in the same atmosphere as careful, rational thought.
‘I don’t think that would be wise.’
‘Wise!’ He flung his hands in the air in a gesture of total exasperation. ‘Wise! And you think being wise matters right now?’
He’d said the wrong thing. He could see it in the way her eyes sparked, the mulish, mutinous set to that neat chin.
‘Common sense certainly does,’ she said stiffly, all trace of that warm, responsive woman disappearing under a layer of ice. ‘I know nothing about you! Not even your full name or—’
‘Corsentino,’ he inserted sharply as she drew a breath to go on. ‘Vittorio Corsentino, usually known as Vito.’
‘And is that supposed to mean something to me?’
‘No.’
He was glad to see that it didn’t. That there was no change in the expression in those soft blue eyes. There
