you’re just a power-freak,’ she said, half crossly.
A smile curved his mouth. ‘But you like that, too.’
‘Sometimes.’ Not always. Sometimes she would give a hundred erotic highs just to see him show even the briefest flicker of vulnerability—but that would be like wishing for the sky to suddenly start raining diamonds instead of hailstones. ‘Sometimes I wish you’d just relax a bit more.’
‘I’ll relax later,’ he promised silkily, and pulled her into the cradle of his arms. ‘I promise you.’
‘I don’t just mean in bed,’ said Lucy primly. ‘It may be an alien concept to you, Guido, but you are allowed to let your hair down at other times.’
‘Shh. Enough. That is enough, cara.’
Lucy rested her head against his shoulder and lapsed into a silence that was just the wrong side of contentment as she registered his unspoken reprimand. Was she nagging him? She stared out of the window just as the expensive car purred its way up Park Avenue and came to a halt in front of a rather beautiful old building.
She turned back to find his eyes watching her intently. ‘Why are we stopping here?’
‘Because we’ve arrived.’
Behind the Titian swing of her fringe, Lucy knitted her eyebrows together. ‘This doesn’t look like a hotel!’
‘That’s because it isn’t.’ He smiled, as if nothing was at stake. But something was, and they both knew it. ‘I thought you might like to see my apartment.’
LUCY could read nothing in the ebony glitter of Guido’s eyes, and somehow she kept her own expression casual—even though, deep down, she felt slightly shell-shocked. Guido wanted to take her home! Well, to one of his homes, that would be more accurate. At last. Now, why would that be?
‘Your apartment?’ she questioned slowly.
Not the kind of rapturous excitement he might have expected—which just went to show that in life you should expect nothing. ‘Wouldn’t you like to see it?’
She smiled at him. ‘Of course I would.’
Up until now they’d always stayed in hotels—a city-central room was one of the perks of her flying job and, as a fabulously successful property developer, Guido rented luxury suites all over the world. In New York and in Paris he did actually own an apartment, but Lucy had seen neither.
To be allowed to set foot inside her boyfriend’s home shouldn’t have felt like a major achievement, but somehow it did. Was that what happened when you went out with a man like Guido? she wondered. You began to normalise abnormal behaviour?
He bent to retrieve her hat from the floor of the limousine. ‘Want me to put it on for you?’
She felt her cheeks growing pink as she shook her head. ‘I hate that hat,’ she said, more fervently than her opinion on a hat really warranted, but she could read the expression in his eyes perfectly well. He was remembering how she had come to lose the hat, and what had happened subsequently, and despite her reservations already she could feel the renewed rush of desire.
‘It looks tre`s chic on you,’ he whispered. And then, because he wanted her very badly, he took her hand and kissed it. ‘Come. Let us go inside. The driver will bring your bags.’
‘Are you quite sure about this?’ she murmured, as they rode up in the elevator towards the penthouse.
Actually, Guido had suffered a couple of reservations—until he’d told himself that he was in danger of becoming some fabled recluse. And he knew instinctively that he could trust Lucy not to gossip about his home.
Idly, he stroked his finger along the indentation of her waist. ‘I want someone to sample my cooking.’
This time Lucy couldn’t hide her surprise as she tried and failed spectacularly to imagine him in the kitchen. ‘You mean you cook?’
‘Actually, no, I don’t.’ His black eyes gleamed. ‘Do you?’
Lucy nodded solemnly. ‘Oh, yes. I adore cooking. In fact, I adore waiting on men in general. So I do hope you’ll let me run round after you just as soon as we get there. You will, won’t you, Guido?’
It took about three seconds for him to register the sarcastic note in her voice, and he pulled her into his arms. ‘You are a wicked witch of a woman, Lucy Maguire,’ he growled, and began to trail his lips over her cheek.
She closed her eyes, the raw and lemony feral scent of him invading her senses like a potent drug. The teasing comment pleased her, for in his voice she had heard the faintest note of puzzlement.
He couldn’t work her out; she knew that—and she had actively encouraged it—but it was much more than a game to her. He closed himself off from her, so why should it fall on her shoulders to provide a one-way emotional show?
At the moment she had an air of mystery which he found alluring. If she allowed him to twitch that curtain of mystery aside, to let daylight come flooding in, then who knew what would happen?
She turned her head so that her lips brushed warm and soft and provocatively against his, and his eyes widened, surprising her with their hectic glitter.
‘I want you,’ he ground out.
‘I should hope so, too,’ she answered demurely.
‘I want you so badly I could do it—’
‘Here?’ she pre-empted, brazenly cupping him once more. Only this time he didn’t push her away. This time he groaned. She continued to trickle her fingers against his rock-hard shaft, pressing her lips close to his ear, as he had done to her at the airport. ‘Do you want me to unzip you, Guido?’ she questioned softly. ‘To free you and then to slowly take you into my mouth? To lick my tongue up and down until you can hold back no longer and—’
He gave a roar like an angry lion as the lift pinged to a halt, buckling back the doors as if they were the enemy and unlocking his apartment, thanking God that he had had the foresight to dismiss all his staff for the rest of the day.
He slammed the door shut behind them, and Lucy—for all her carefully suppressed curiosity—didn’t get a chance to notice any princely artefacts, for Guido was taking her by the hand in a way which broached no argument. But there again, who wanted to argue? Certainly not her.
He stopped short of actually kicking the bedroom door open, but his punch to it was so forceful that he might as well have done. Only when it was shut behind them did they stand facing one another, like two protagonists squaring up for a fight.
His breathing was laboured, and Lucy’s heart was beating so rapidly that she felt faint. She was blind to the beauty of the New York skyline captured outside the enormous window—blind to anything other than the beauty of his face. She drank in the stark hunger which momentarily made his features look almost cruel, and the knowledge that she had him on a knife-edge of desire filled her with a sense of daring.
He
