reaching down to touch him intimately, and he moaned his soft pleasure. He liked the way she encircled him within those dextrous fingers and the way she slid them up and down to lightly stroke the pulsing and erect flesh. He liked the way she teased him as he had taught her to tease him and to make him wait, until he felt like her captive slave. But today his hunger would not be tempered and he could not wait, his desire for her off the scale. He had let her sleep on the plane because she had looked exhausted after the wedding, but now his appetite knew no bounds. The bikini was discarded to join the sarong as he wriggled his fingers between her legs. She jerked distractedly as he found her tight bud, her nails digging into his bare shoulders as he increased his rhythmical stroke.
‘You like that,’ he observed, with a satisfied purr.
‘Don’t...don’t stop, will you?’ she gasped.
He gave a low laugh. ‘I have no intention of stopping, bedda mia. I couldn’t stop, even if I wanted to.’ But suddenly he no longer wanted to pleasure her with his finger and, positioning himself over her, he parted her thighs and drove into her. He groaned as she matched each urgent thrust with the accommodating jerk of her hips. He revelled in the feel of her, the taste of her and the smell of her. Was it because there was no need for a condom that sex with Molly felt even more incredible than it had done before? Or because he was the one who had taught her everything? She’d never taken a man into her mouth before him, nor sucked him until he was empty and gasping. Just as she’d never had anyone’s head between her thighs other than his. He closed his eyes as excitement built at a speed which almost outpaced him. Was he really so primitive that he got some kind of thrill from having bareback sex with his one-time virgin? He drove into her again. Maybe he was.
She began to come, her moans of pleasure spiralling up from the back of her throat and hovering on the edge of a scream, so that he clamped his mouth over hers in an urgent kiss. He felt the rush of her breath in his mouth and the helpless judder of her body clenching around him—and his own response was like a powerful wave which crashed over him and pulled him under. With a groan, he ejaculated, one hand splayed underneath her bottom while the other tangled in her silken hair. Beneath the Barbadian sun he felt the exquisite pulsing of his body as passion seeped away.
For a while he just lay on top of her, dazed and contented, his head cushioned on her shoulder as he dipped in and out of sleep. But eventually he stirred, his fingertips tilting her jaw, enjoying the beatific smile which curved her lips as she opened her eyes to look at him.
‘So. We have a choice,’ he said slowly. ‘We can get dressed again and ring for drinks, or I can go inside and fix us something and you can stay exactly as you are, which would be my preference.’
She hesitated for a moment. ‘I wouldn’t mind you waiting on me for a change,’ she said. ‘Unless you’re going to do that helpless man thing of making a mess of it because it’s domestic, so that you’ll never have to do it again.’
His mouth twitched into a smile as he rose from the lounger. ‘Is that what men do?’
‘In my experience—well, only my working experience, of course. Every time.’
‘Not this one.’ He picked up the battered straw hat which had fallen off, jamming it down so that the shadow of the brim darkened his face. ‘I don’t like to fail at anything, Molly.’
She watched him go. Was it that which had hurt the hardest when his life had imploded around him—the fact that he would be perceived as a failure? Had that been at the root of his reluctance to return to Naples very often? Yet he had picked himself up and started all over again. He had made a success of his life in every way, except for one. Just before they’d boarded his private jet to fly here, he’d told her how delighted his parents were that he had chosen her as his bride and she found herself thinking how skewed life could be sometimes. His mother hadn’t liked Lauren Meyer, but Salvio had loved her. He’d told her that himself. And if this marriage was to continue, she must resign herself to the fact that she would only ever be second-best.
But that had been her life, hadn’t it? It wasn’t as if she wasn’t used to it. When you worked in other people’s houses you had to put yourself second, because you were only there to help their lives function smoothly. You had to be both efficient yet invisible, because people didn’t really see you—only the service you provided.
Did Salvio see her? she wondered. Or was she simply a vessel to bear his child? The woman he had transformed with his vast fortune, so that she could lie in a Barbadian paradise, looking out over an azure sea as if she’d been born to this life?
The chink of ice made her glance towards the entrance to their villa, where Salvio was standing holding two tall, frosted glasses. As he began to walk towards her she wondered how a man could look so utterly at ease, completely naked save for his sunhat.
Handing her a glass, he joined her on the lounger and for a while they sipped their drinks in silence.
‘Salvio,’ she said eventually, watching the ice melt in the fruity cocktail.
He turned his face towards her. ‘Mmm...?’
‘What am I actually going to do? I mean, once we get back to England and you go back to work.’
He swirled the ice around in his glass, his fingers dark against the sunlit condensation. ‘Weren’t we planning to have a baby?’
‘Yes, we were. Are,’ she corrected. ‘But that might not happen straight away, might it? And I can’t just sit around all the time just...waiting.’
There was a pause. ‘You want me to find you something to do?’ He studied her carefully. ‘There’s a charitable arm belonging to my company. Do you think you’d like to get involved in that?’
She hesitated, genuine surprise tearing through her at the realisation he must think her good enough to be a part of his organisation. But it wasn’t his validation which pleased her as much as the thought that this would make her a more integral part of his life—and wasn’t that what marriage was all about? ‘I’d like that very much.’ She smiled, but his next words killed her pleasure stone dead.
‘You know your brother tapped me for a loan at the wedding?’
The glass she was holding almost slipped from her suddenly nerveless fingers and quickly Molly put it down, her cheeks flaming. ‘What?’
‘He said he had an idea for a new business venture and asked if I’d like to invest in it.’
‘You didn’t say yes?’
‘You think I’m in the habit of throwing money away? I asked him how much he had already raised, and how—but he seemed reluctant to answer.’ Beneath the shadowed brim of his hat, she saw that his eyes were now as hard and as cold as jet. ‘Did you know about this, Molly?’
It hurt that he should ask but, when she thought about it afterwards, why wouldn’t he ask? Salvio had been a target for women during his playing days and had fallen for someone who saw him as nothing but a trophy husband. He made no secret of not trusting women—so why should he feel any differently about her?
‘Of course I didn’t know he was going to ask you,’ she said in a low voice. ‘And if he’d sought my opinion I would have told him not to even think about it.’
He nodded as he stared out at the bright blue horizon and the subject was closed. But Molly’s determination not to let his silky
