to give and much more besides. With the most erotic of touches he skimmed his palms seductively across the bared satin surface of her breasts, his blue eyes intensely engaged by the sight of them. Then he lifted his head to look straight into Laura’s eyes.
‘You are so beautiful,’ he breathed.
‘When you look at me that way … I feel it,’ she replied, her heart racing. Mark had never told her she was beautiful … he’d always been too busy pointing out her inadequacies.
In another searing hard kiss Fabian’s demanding mouth met hers. His breath was hot and his tongue was erotically silky. Laura thought her desire would burst at the seams if he did not give her what she ached for soon. This man—this self-contained, unashamed denouncer of love, fighting a silent war with his past—this paradoxical man with his heavensent looks and melting eyes who longed for children of his own but not a wife he could love—had released something inside her she’d almost forgotten might be there. Something pent-up and necessary that she’d long suppressed throughout her devastatingly difficult and painful marriage to Mark.
Now, as Fabian murmured in her ear and then reached for the protection he had in his trouser pocket, she watched him roll it on over his aroused sex with bated breath. Returning to her swiftly, to drag her white silk panties urgently down over her legs, he moved her silken thighs apart with his knee and pressed deep inside her—filling and scalding her with his demanding length. Her back arched at the impact, heat ripping through her like a fire bent on consuming everything in its path, and she knew she would never forget their first intimate connection if she lived to be a hundred!
Laura clutched the smooth hard biceps that bulged like iron as he thrust into her, rocking her body in the primal rhythm of this most intimate act, secretly delighting in the feminine power that she wielded over him in that moment. It made her forget that she wasn’t beautiful all over, that she had scars that would be with her for the rest of her life … both inside and out. Fabian was murmuring seductively to her in his own passionate tongue, and although Laura did not understand everything he said, the sound and intense expression of the words made her blood sing. Willingly she surrendered to the avalanche of feelings that seemed to hold her in thrall and build inside her, and as he drove into her again and again, holding her fast against him, she was unable to stop herself from crying her pleasure out loud to the softly cloaked night.
‘You cannot hold back now, my beautiful Laura.’
‘Fabian … what you’re doing to me!’
‘Tell me …’ he whispered, before he put his mouth to her breast and sucked hard. ‘What am I doing?’
‘You’re making me … You’re making me—’
She gasped as waves of honeyed heat flowed violently through her and then, as they ebbed, turned into a sweet, languorous half-dream that meant she could barely bring herself to move. But at the same time she had the notion that she had never been more awake or aware in her entire life before.
‘Don’t move,’ Fabian ordered gruffly, before thrusting into Laura one last time and groaning his own intense satisfaction as his head fell forward between her breasts.
‘I couldn’t move even if I wanted to,’ she whispered, her lips edging into a smile.
‘Marry me,’ he said, raising his head, want and need flaring bright in his eyes.
A crescendo of longing swept through Laura’s heart. How could she think of refusing him when he was everything she’d ever dreamed of in a man? She might be judged weak and too reckless for words, accepting such a proposal from him, but her feelings had a life and a mind of their own, and they were far too powerful to ignore.
She thought about the small boy who’d suffered such a hurtful childhood—ill-treated by his father and losing his mother far too young—and at the same time she thought about Fabian’s need to redress the balance by being a good father to a child or children of his own. And Laura thought about her own fierce need to be a mother.
‘All right,’ she heard herself say. ‘I will.’
Lifting her hand, she stroked the thick tarnished gold strands of his temptingly silky hair, and he turned his lips into her palm and kissed her. Sensing her heart swell with emotion, she knew that she’d reached her decision long before he’d felt moved to ask her the question again.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘WE SHOULD go to Roma.’ ‘Rome?’
‘Si—I have an apartment there. We can have a short holiday and take the opportunity to spend some time alone together. I will show you all the places and sights that the tourists like to see, and some of the not so famous ones that only the locals know about … Sound good?’
‘It sounds wonderful … But, Fabian?’
‘You have reservations about this idea?’
He said all this as he was dressing, and as Laura watched him button up his immaculate white shirt over that heavenly chest, with its slick, solid musculature, she felt as if she was suspended in some euphoric dream she never wanted to wake up from.
The past two weeks had been a whirl of organisation and activity, with an emotional trip back to England for Laura to spend time with her parents before returning to Tuscany and an impatient Fabian back at the Villa de Rosa. Her family had been dumbstruck she’d made such a shock decision to remarry—and to a man she ‘barely knew’. She’d just about convinced them she really did know what she was doing, and had not finally succumbed to a breakdown after all that had happened.
The civil ceremony for Laura and Fabian’s marriage had taken place just yesterday. Their two witnesses had been a supportive and excited Carmela, back from honeymoon—she believed Laura and her enigmatic boss to be genuinely in love—and Maria. The charming Cybele had been a flower girl, and afterwards just a few select friends of Fabian’s had been invited to a discreetly located restaurant for the wedding supper.
But the future she faced was no romantic walk into the sunset with the man she adored. Despite his amorous attentions and apparent concern for her welfare, Fabian had not married Laura because he loved her. He had married her because he desperately wanted an heir and she was the most suitable candidate.
Now, with just a sheet to cover her, she sat on the edge of the fabulous bed in their room and tried hard to put her thoughts in order. Events had run away with her, and it was time to take a good look at exactly what she’d done. From now on she was no longer ‘anonymous’ Laura Greenwood, but Signora Moritzzoni of the fabulous Villa de Rosa. Her husband was a wealthy and influential man who commanded respect in this part of the world where he came from—where a family’s name and lineage was everything. Laura would bear his children, and to all intents and purposes be his partner, but she could not expect ever to receive his love or devotion in return.
Her stomach plunged at the thought. Her feelings for him made the whole idea of this marriage of convenience a farce. How long could she keep up the charade of containing them when that was clearly not what Fabian wanted or expected? After the experience she’d literally only just survived with Mark, why had she been so utterly reckless as to dance so close to the volcano’s edge again? The answer was that she’d married Fabian because after the trauma of the past few years she still dared to dream that a bright future might be hers. He wasn’t anything like Mark … She knew that. There was something special about him that was nothing to do with wealth, status, talent or even the extraordinary
