hand closed round him, for she was full of desire and curiosity, and she learned that he was strong and smooth, velvet over steel. Answering heat flowered between her legs so that when he took her mouth again with hungry urgency she more than reciprocated the feeling. He began to explore her most secret and responsive flesh, tracing the delicate folds, teasing the nub of her desire and then the damp little entrance. It wasn’t long before little whimpers of sound were escaping her throat, the strength of her wanting making her legs tremble while the unbearable craving and the ache at the heart of her grew stronger by the second. She had not known that anything could feel that powerful and least of all that it might be him who introduced her to the powerfully addictive force of desire.
He taught her to want what she had never learned to want, only wondered about, what she had truly believed she might go to her grave without experiencing, and she had honestly thought that it wouldn’t matter because she wasn’t really missing anything important. So he taught her differently, stroking her with skilful fingers, licking at the wildly sensitive buds of her nipples while he surely, gently prepared her for the ultimate pleasure. But the yearning inside her for more steadily grew intolerable, sharp-edged, greedy and impatient so that she bit in impatient reproach at his lower lip and let her trembling fingers close tight into his luxuriant black hair.
Fluid and strong, he came over her, sliding between her thighs when she was shaking and desperate with pent-up need. She was wildly eager for that first gentle thrust, feeling the stretch of her inner tissue struggling to contain him and then the surge of his hips against her as he drove deeper. It hurt a little more than she had expected and she could not suppress a cry of pain. Instantly he stopped, gazing down at her with those drowningly dark and golden eyes of his that were so beautiful they made her ache.
‘I’m sorry, moglie mia,’ he whispered, brushing her tumbled curls from her brow to press a benediction of a kiss there. ‘It will ease…I hope.’
Her inner muscles tightened round him and he groaned with an uninhibited sensuality that thrilled her and he shifted lightly, slowly, sinking into her by erotic degrees until she didn’t know where he ended and she began. But it was an overpoweringly good feeling and she moved sinuously beneath him, angling up her hips to encourage him, all discomfort forgotten. As he withdrew and came back into her, her excitement began to build. Excitement laced with deep, deep pleasure at the motion of him in her and over her. His slow, steady rhythm ensured that the tight feeling low in her pelvis began to expand and spread outward, sucking her into a vortex of intense driving sensation. And then without even knowing where she was going and simply blindly allowing the force of her response to carry her with it, she reached a peak and the incredible waves of pleasure gathered her up and threw her down again on the other side. In a daze she floated back to earth again.
Cesario was watching her with dark, dark eyes when she recovered her senses again and his hand was closed over one of hers, his body hot and damp and intimately masculine against her thigh. She looked back at him with light eyes that still reflected some of her wonderment at what had just transpired. His strong jaw line squared.
‘Don’t look at me like that. Don’t forget our agreement,’ he breathed suddenly, his keen gaze narrowed on her feverishly flushed face. ‘I didn’t ask for your love and I don’t want it. We will share a bed, nothing more, until a child is born, piccola mia.’
It was like an unanticipated slap in the face for Jess and she went straight into shock, recognising that he, of all men, would recognise when a woman might be getting a little too attached, a little too serious. Her facial muscles tightened, her expression carefully schooled to blankness as a wave of anger and pain broke inside her like a tide crashing on the shore. She would not give him the satisfaction of knowing that he had hit pay-dirt with that cold-blooded warning. She would not respond with the angry resentment that would reveal that he had wounded her.
‘I don’t have love to give you,’ Jess fielded flatly as she deliberately shifted away from him, rejecting that deceptive togetherness for the pretence that it so clearly was. ‘I love my family and my pets and some day I will love my child, but I’m afraid that’s it. I am a very sensible person when it comes to my emotions.’
A slight darkening of skin tone over his cheekbones hinted that she might have touched him on the raw. He screened his gaze and murmured levelly, ‘I just don’t want you to be hurt.’
‘I’m strong, much stronger than you seem to think,’ Jess countered, and then, in a tone of polite enquiry calculated to underline that declaration for his benefit, ‘Are you staying here for the night? Or do we sleep separately?’
Cesario sat up as though she had elbowed him in the ribs. ‘My room is next door.’
‘Goodnight,’ Jess told him sweetly.
‘Buone notte, ben dorme…sleep well,’ he breathed, springing out of the bed, pausing only to pick up his clothes before he vanished through the connecting door.
Sleep well? Jess might almost have laughed at that piece of advice until she cried. She freshened up with a shower in the superb adjoining bathroom, went downstairs briefly to take care of her dogs and then finally crawled back into bed, the slight persistent ache at the very heart of her as much a reminder of what had changed in her life as the lingering scent of his cologne and his body on the pillow beside hers. Breathing that aroma in, she groaned out loud and shut him out of her head.
Her thoughts came in a kind of vague shorthand because she was blocking out so much of what she was feeling and denying the pained sense of loneliness, loss and rejection she was experiencing. Her husband had introduced her to sex. He was good at sex and she was very lucky that that was so, she told herself determinedly. He had tried to pretend that theirs was a normal marriage but he had lied. He didn’t want her to care about him. But she was a proud and clever woman and she would respect his warning. She would not make the foolish mistake of falling in love with a man who’d made it clear from the outset that he could never love her back.
She also wondered dully if it was true that he was still in love with Alice. That would give him a very good reason to make a marriage of convenience in an effort to produce the heir he required to gain legal title to his family home. If he was already in love with another woman, a businesslike arrangement was his only real hope.
Jess told herself that it made no odds to her whether or not Cesario loved another woman. Such subtleties, such secrets, were beyond her remit and immaterial in terms of a marriage already openly acknowledged to be one of pure practicality. Why should she give a hoot if he cherished another woman in his heart? On that challenging thought, sheer mental and physical exhaustion dragged Jess down into a deep, dreamless sleep…
CESARIO was suffering from an appalling headache. He had taken his medication but it had yet to kick in. Actually, he wanted a drink, but knew that alcohol was a bad idea with powerful painkillers. He massaged his brow and tried to loosen his taut neck muscles while studiously endeavouring to suppress all the negative thoughts threatening his equilibrium. He had been warned about headaches and this was as bad as he had been promised: so far, so normal…
He knew his bride thought that he was a cold, callous bastard, but he had said what he’d had to say and drawn a necessary line in the sand. He didn’t want her on his conscience. He didn’t want to hurt her either. It struck him as strange that he had not foreseen that possibility before he married her. Was he really so single-minded and selfish that he had not considered the damage he might inflict? Evidently, he was.
Determined to stay grounded, he reminded himself that
