Leo raked out an angry sigh. ‘I will not have Rico’s name thrown in my face by you every five minutes!’
Natasha swung round on him in full choking fury. ‘I did not throw his name at you—you battered me with it!’
‘That was not my intention,’ he returned stiffly.
Twisting on the seat, she glared at the glazed partition. ‘You’re no better than Rico, just different than Rico in the way you treat people—women!’ she shook out with a withering glance across the width of the seat. ‘Since we are driving along here like a presidential cavalcade, your loathsome arrogance is one fault I will let you have, but your—’
‘Loathsome—again?’ he mocked lazily.
It blew the lid off what was left of her temper. ‘And utterly, pathetically jealous of Rico!’
Silence clattered down all around them with the same effect as crashing cymbals hitting the crescendo note and making Natasha’s heart begin to race. She could not believe she had just said that. Daring another glance at Leo, she could see him looking back at her like a man-eating shark about to go on the attack, and now she couldn’t even breathe because the tension between them was sucking what was left of the oxygen out of the luxury confines of the car.
He reacted with a lightning strike. For such a big man he moved with a lithe, silent stealth and the next thing she knew she was being hauled through the space separating them to land in an inelegant sprawl of body and limbs across his lap. Their eyes clashed, his glittering with golden sparks of anger she hadn’t seen in them before. Hers were too wide and too blue and—scared of what was suddenly fizzing in her blood.
She had to lick her suddenly very dry lips just to manage a husky, ‘I didn’t really m-mean—’
Then came the kiss—the hot and passionate ambush that silenced her attempt to retract what she’d said, and flung her instead into fight with lips and tongues and hands that did not know how to stay still. His breath seared her mouth and a set of long fingers was clamped to the rounded shape of her hip, her own fingers applying digging pressure to whatever part of his anatomy they could reach as their mouths strained and fought. The motion of the car and the fact that they were even in one became lost in the uneven fight. She wriggled against him. His hand maintained its controlling clamp. She felt her fingernails clawing at his nape and the rock-solid moulding of his chest so firmly imprinted against his shirt.
He loved it. She caught his tense hiss of pleasure in her mouth and felt a tight, pleasurable shudder attack his front, the powerful surge of his response making itself felt against the thigh he held pressed into his lap. Then his hand was sliding beneath her skirt and stroking the pale skin at the top of her thigh where her stockings did not reach. If he stroked any higher, he was going to discover that she was wearing a thong and she increased her struggle to get free before he reached there, lost the fight, and a quiver of agonising embarrassment sent her kiss-fighting mouth very still.
‘Well, what do we have here?’ he paused to murmur slowly, long fingers stroking over a smoothly rounded, satin-skinned buttock and crippling Natasha’s ability to breathe. ‘The prim disguise is really beginning to wear very thin the more I dig beneath it.’
‘Shut up,’ she choked, eyes squeezed tight shut now. She was never going to wear a thong ever again, she vowed hectically.
He removed his hand and her eyes shot open because she needed to know what he was going to do next, and found herself staring into his mockingly smiling face. The anger had gone and his lazily, sensual male confidence was firmly back in place.
‘Any more hidden treasures left for me to discover?’ He arched a sleek, dark, quizzing eyebrow.
‘No,’ Natasha mumbled, which made him release a dark, husky laugh that shimmered right through her as potently as everything else about him did.
Then he wasn’t smiling. ‘OK, so I am jealous of Rico where you are concerned.’ He really shocked her by admitting it. ‘So take my advice and don’t bring him into our bed or I will not be responsible for the way I react.’
Before she could respond to that totally unexpected back-down, he was lowering his head again and crushing her mouth. How long this kiss went on Natasha had no idea, because she just lost herself in the warm, slow, heady promise it was offering.
The car began to slow.
Both felt the change in speed but it was Leo who broke away and with a sigh lifted her from him to place her back on the seat. Lounging back into the corner of the car, he then watched the way she concentrated on trying to tidy herself, shaky fingers checking buttons and pulling her skirt into place across her knees.
‘Miss Prim.’ He laughed softly.
Lifting her fingers to smooth her hair, Natasha said nothing, a troubled frown toying with her brow now because she just could not understand how she could fall victim to his kisses as thoroughly as she did.
‘It’s called sexual attraction, pethi mou,’ Leo explained, reading her thoughts as if he owned them now.
Her profile held Leo’s attention as it turned a gentle pink. If he did not know otherwise, he would swear that Natasha Moyles was an absolute novice when it came to sexual foreplay. She ran from cold to hot to shy and dignified. She was not coquettish. She did not flirt or invite. She appeared to have no idea what she did to him yet she was so acutely receptive to anything that he did to her.
And she made him ache just to sit here looking at her. It was not an unpleasant condition; in fact, it had been so many years since he’d felt this sexually switched on to a woman, he’d believed he had lost the capacity to feel anything quite this intense.
Gianna had done that to him, scraped him dry of so many feelings and turned him into an emotional cynic. But his ex-wife was not someone he wanted to be thinking of right now, he told himself as he focused his attention back on this woman who was keeping his senses on edge just by sitting here next to him.
‘We have arrived,’ he murmured, using the information like yet another sexual promise to taunt her with, then watched her slender spine grow tense as she glanced beyond the car’s tinted glass to catch sight of the twin iron gates that guarded the entrance to his property.
Natasha stared at the gates as they slid apart to their approach. All three cars swept smoothly through them, then two cars veered off to the left almost immediately while theirs made a direct line for the front of his white-painted, three-storey villa.
Rasmus was out of the car and opening Leo’s door the moment the car pulled to a stop at the bottom of the curving front steps. Leo climbed out, ruefully aware that his legs didn’t feel like holding him up. Desire was a gnawing, debilitating ache once it buried its teeth in you, he mused ruefully as he turned to watch his driver open the other passenger door so the object of his desire could step out of the car.
She gazed across the top of the car up at his villa with its modern curving frontage built to follow the shape of the white marbled steps. Light spilled out of curving-glass windows offset in three tiers framed by white terrace rails.
‘I live at the top,’ he said. ‘The guest suites cover the middle floor. My staff have the run of the ground floor… what do you think?’
‘Very ocean-going liner,’ Natasha murmured.
Leo
