CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SIX
H E WAITED .
For fifteen long minutes, which ticked by with unbearable slowness, Romano waited, convincing himself that Kelly must have had second thoughts by now. Of course she would. They were sworn enemies, weren’t they? They had history. And why the hell was he giving her the power of making a decision? There was nothing stopping him from turning off his light and going to sleep and putting it out of his mind completely. He’d spent a whole lifetime asserting his self-will and sense of control and it had never let him down before.
But tonight he seemed powerless to resist the urgent demands of his body. He couldn’t seem to shake off the memory of how good she had felt in his arms, just as he couldn’t seem to eradicate the scent of her sex, which lingered on his fingers. Actually, he didn’t even try. Just lay there drifting them beneath his nostrils and imagined putting his mouth to that sweet, moist spot. Until, like a man enchanted, he slipped from his room, silently making his way to the second floor where his nemesis lay, his heart pounding erratically when he saw the thin shaft of golden light spilling out from beneath the wooden door.
His groin hardened as he acknowledged the silent invitation, but still he made an effort to fight it. Go, he urged himself, with a sudden swift stab of desperation. Go now, while you still can. But despite the reservations which were stabbing into his mind, he found himself pushing open the wooden door and closing it quietly behind him.
She was in bed, waiting.
A siren.
He swallowed.
No, certainly not that. A siren would have removed those pyjamas and been lying there, artfully posed, with all her delightfully naked flesh on display, while all he could see of Kelly was the spill of red hair over those cherry-covered shoulders. Yet that didn’t seem to matter. His stomach curled as he acknowledged the blatant temptation she exuded, propped up against a bank of white pillows, looking impossibly tiny in the four-poster bed.
‘You left your light on,’ he observed softly.
‘That’s right,’ she said, but he noticed that her voice sounded a little shaky.
‘You’ve still got time to change your mind.’
‘Will you only be convinced if I hold up a placard saying, yes, please ?’
With a powerful beat of anticipation, he walked over to the bed and sat down on the edge, idly lifting a handful of bright curls and letting them fall again so that they caught the light from the lamp like a flame. Slowly, he traced his finger along the line of her jaw and the quivering curve of her lips and felt her breathing quicken. He took his time before he bent his head to kiss her, for as long as it took her to dissolve all over again, which wasn’t long. Within seconds she was moving restlessly in his arms, running her fingers frantically through his hair, and he felt his groin grow even harder. Disbelievingly, he shook his head. Had he ever been this hard before?
With a groan he disentangled her arms and stood up so that he could begin to undress and this, too, was different. He had undressed before countless women in the past, usually to murmurs of approval or very graphic descriptions about the generous dimensions of his manhood. But never had he been so painfully aware of his audience. He wanted to tell her to stop looking at him like that, with that curious mixture of hunger and shyness, as he carefully slid the zip down over his aching hardness. Was that how she operated in the bedroom? he wondered with a grim kind of resentment. Providing her lovers with the ultimate fantasy of innocence and experience in order to turn them on? If that were the case, it was certainly working.
Climbing into bed, he pulled her against him and her lips sought his almost clumsily as he began to remove her pyjamas. Yet for once he was clumsy, too. There was none of his usual finesse as he roughly dealt with the offending garments and threw them to the floor. Not that she seemed to mind. Or even to notice. Her attention was focussed totally on him. She was all soft and responsive flesh, moaning a little as his thumb circled each nipple and moaning some more as he slid his hand between her legs.
‘You’re going to need to keep the noise down,’ he warned her softly as he stroked the firm silk of her thigh.
‘I will,’ she whispered.
He found the liquid heart of her. Began to beat a steady rhythm against her molten skin. Saw her bite down on her lip as he felt a rush of honeyed heat against his fingertips. Suddenly she was writhing her hips with urgent and purposeful frustration and when he glanced down at her face and saw what was about to happen, he had to claim her lips in a crushing kiss to quieten her. He felt her spasm around his finger, over and over again, her little bleats of fulfilment absorbed by the pressure of his mouth, until finally she grew still.
In the apricot lamplight he could see two flares of colour arrowing her high cheekbones as she slumped back against the pillows. ‘Oh,’ she whispered, her eyes wide and dazed as she stared up at him. ‘That was…’
‘Quick?’ he murmured.
She nodded. ‘Did you…mind?’
‘Your enthusiasm is…refreshing,’ he observed cryptically.
It was a remark he had never made within the bedroom before and it appeared to have given her the green light because suddenly she came at him like a little dynamo, kissing his nose, his eyelids and jaw and softly nipping his earlobes in a display of what felt almost like gratitude . Her unconstrained zeal was wildly arousing but Romano knew he needed to take command. If she didn’t slow down and continued to move against him like that, there would be consequences and he was a man who always prided himself on his pace and performance.
He reached for a condom, but after he’d stroked on the protection, she climbed on top of him and suddenly his control was slipping away. The warm, sweet weight of her was irresistible. Her breasts were swaying against his skin as he curved his fingers possessively over the pert silken globes of her buttocks and suddenly he was rocked by the urgent need to possess her.
‘Kelly,’ he groaned.
‘What?’
‘You’re so…’ But for once he was lost for words.
‘So are you,’ she whispered back, using that same erotic verbal shorthand as she stroked her fingertips over his back.
He had intended to flip her over so that he could drive deep inside her—demonstrating his preferred position of dominance—but his swollen tip was so tantalisingly close to her wet folds that he found himself edging inside her. He swallowed, compelled by an urgent need to possess her. He just couldn’t stop himself.
But something else could.
Romano wasn’t sure exactly when he realised.
When he met that first resistance, or when she gave a tiny yelp of pain?
It was heaven to be inside her, but hell to realise the significance of that small cry. He tried to withdraw but by then he was too far gone. He lifted his head to kiss her and slowed his movements down, so that her body could learn to accommodate his, and once she had relaxed, he filled her completely. With a fierce and primeval need he moved inside her molten heat, aware of the encroaching sensation of something he couldn’t define. Something he’d never experienced before.
Was it because she felt so tight that this felt so overwhelming, or because for so long it had formed the basis of his most forbidden fantasy? Suddenly he realised that for the first time in his life he wasn’t going to be able to wait for her. That he was powerless to stop himself coming and it was happening now. He was falling from a great height. He was out of control . His seed was being torn from a body which felt as if it were being splintered into a million pieces, and Romano choked out his shattered disbelief as he orgasmed.
He didn’t know how long he lay there, gathering together his breath, stunned and disbelieving that he had allowed himself to walk straight into a honeytrap, as old as time itself. But he didn’t focus on it until after he’d made love to her again, this time ensuring that he brought her to another rapid orgasm, which had her blissfully choking out his name.
And then came the anger.
Kelly lay very still, scarcely daring to breathe, let alone speak. She thought he must be asleep. In a way, she hoped he was because she needed to get her thoughts together and work out what she was going to do when he opened his eyes. First up, she needed to dial down her instinctive reaction, which was to spill out her gratitude and delight and tell him that he was the most incredible lover. She didn’t need to. He must know that. He had been everything she could have hoped for—and more.
The way he had stilled when he had first entered her and tangled his fingers into her hair until the pain had passed. And after that he’d been so…so… wild . He had choked out his own delicious pleasure and then explored her with breathtaking thoroughness, bringing her to another shuddering orgasm, which had made her want to weep with pleasure. A lump rose in her throat. Never in a million years would she have guessed it would be the grouchy and authoritative Romano Castelliari who could make her feel as if she could soar like a bird through the starlit heavens. Who knew?
For a long time she’d worried she wasn’t like other women. Mostly because there weren’t many virgins as old as her. Over time her innocence had become a silent, nagging burden, rather than the badge of pride she’d been brought up to believe in. She’d wondered if her mother’s jaundiced proclamations about how men could never be trusted had scared her off so much that she would never be able to respond to one sexually. That she was…
She remembered the word flung at her by her first and only real boyfriend, when she’d refused to go to ‘first base’—which she had thought was a pretty horrible way to describe touching her breasts. He’d said afterwards that he’d read it in an old book and it was supposed to be ‘ironic’, but at the time…
‘You know there’s a word they use for women like you, don’t you?’
No, she hadn’t known and so, rather stupidly, she had asked him.
‘Frigid. I’m afraid you’re frigid, Kelly.’
Well, she certainly hadn’t been feeling frigid a few minutes ago!
She had been feeling…
She swallowed.
Wanton, yes. But something else, too. As if she’d just discovered a side of herself she hadn’t known existed, which went far deeper than the giving and receiving of pleasure. When Romano had been inside her, she had wanted to weep and marvel at the way she could feel powerful and yet vulnerable all at once. She’d felt emotional and that was dangerous, because that made you susceptible to being hurt. Hadn’t her mother spent her entire life telling her that?
But she mustn’t jump ahead of herself.
She wasn’t sure how to behave but instinct urged her to play it cool, even though she wanted Romano to make love to her again as soon as possible. She wanted that more than she could remember wanting anything. But it was weird having made the transition from enemies to lovers and she wasn’t quite sure how to handle it.
Tentatively, she laid her hand over his heart and felt the powerful beat beneath her palm.
‘Are you awake?’ she whispered.
Romano took a moment before he answered, too preoccupied to trust himself to answer. Oh, stupido sciocco , he raged silently! What a fool he was. His jaw tightened. Not just for making love to a woman who had always been forbidden to him, but compounding it a million times over with his subsequent behaviour. Why her? he wondered resentfully. Why did it have to be Kelly Butler, of all people, who had made him behave like some sort of caveman? Who had felt almost helpless in her embrace, yet at the same time had revelled in it. Who had come almost as soon as he had entered her. What the hell was the matter with him?
He turned his head just in time to catch the wary look she was slanting in his direction, before her long lashes fluttered down to conceal it, and that was when reality kicked in. Because she was good at concealment, he realised bitterly. Good at lots of things. Lying and deceit to name just two. But why should that come as any surprise? She was a woman, after all.
‘You didn’t warn me,’ he observed, his voice deliberately neutral.
She nodded, her hair rippling against the snowy white of the pillows like the burst of a flame. ‘That I was a virgin, you mean?’
‘Now is probably not a good time to try and play the innocent, Kelly. Because you aren’t. At least, not any more.’ He gave a cynical laugh. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Because…it didn’t seem appropriate. It was difficult to find the right moment. Surely you can understand that.’ Her green eyes were filled with appeal. ‘It might have spoiled the mood.’
‘Damned right it would.’
‘I’m just not sure how these things work.’ She tiptoed her fingers over his chest. ‘Should I have asked how many lovers you’d had—and if I had, wouldn’t you have accused me of prying?’
‘Don’t try to change the subject,’ he snapped, batting away her hand. ‘It would have been a courtesy to have told me, that’s all.’
‘A courtesy ?’ Her voice threatened to rise, but he heard her suck in a deep breath before she lowered it again, as if she was afraid of being overheard. ‘You mean like letting your neighbour know if you’re intending to park in their spot?’
He resisted the desire to smile. ‘Please don’t wilfully misunderstand me, Kelly.’
‘There’s nothing wilful about it, I can assure you. I’m just wondering why you seem determined to catastrophise what just happened.’ She hesitated. ‘I enjoyed it and presumably you did too. Well, you appeared to,’ she added, almost shyly.
‘Of course I enjoyed it. You know damned well I did. But that’s not the point. You misled me,’ he accused, steeling himself against that doe-eyed look as he remembered the way she had behaved at school. ‘You’ve always made out you were some kind of good-time girl. You were even doing it the other night when you arrived, with all your talk about a “non-stop party express” .’ He glared. ‘Remember?’
‘I was only confirming your prejudices, Romano. You always did seem determined to think the worst of me—especially when I dropped out of art school, or so Flo told me.’ She shrugged. ‘Why should I be the one to spoil your fun?’
Romano tightened his lips, because that shrug didn’t help. It reminded him that she was naked and it made those glorious breasts move with unfettered provocation, the nipples dancing as if to invite the lick of his tongue. With an effort he tore his gaze away and met the question in her eyes. ‘If I’m such an abhorrent and prejudiced person,’ he continued coolly, ‘then why have sex with me—particularly when it was your first time?’
There was a pause.
‘Is your ego in such need of a boost that you want me to tell you you’re irresistible?’
‘My ego needs no such reassurance. And I guess you’ve got what you’ve always wanted. You’ve realised your schoolgirl ambition to have your wicked way with me,’ he added with soft mockery.
‘That’s right. I have,’ she agreed, and he wondered if he’d imagined the brief disappointment which clouded her eyes before it was replaced by the defiance he had always associated with her and, once again, he felt the unwilling twist of desire.
‘You were a hunger I had to feed, that’s all,’ she continued insouciantly. ‘A hunger which never really went away. There you go again, looking so shocked. You’re terribly old-fashioned at heart, aren’t you, Romano?’
‘My principles remain constant.’
‘How very admirable.’
‘So, it was simply sexual desire?’ he elucidated deliberately, in an attempt to distract himself from the fact that they seemed to be flirting again. ‘Nothing else?’
‘Why, should it have been?’ She wriggled a little on the bed, as if the direct fire of his eyes was making her self-conscious. ‘Is it a prerequisite for taking a woman to bed that they need to be in love with you?’
‘On the contrary,’ he bit out, the words leaving his mouth as if they were poison. ‘I thought I’d made my views on love abundantly clear.’
She looked puzzled and he braced himself for what he knew was coming.
‘I don’t understand why you’re so…vehement about it.’
‘You aren’t intended to understand. And the why is irrelevant. If a woman believes she’s “in love” with me—with absolutely no encouragement on my part—then I’m afraid she’s history.’
She expelled a sigh and shook her head a little. ‘Wow,’ she said at last. ‘That’s probably the most cold-hearted thing I’ve ever heard you say—and it’s a pretty crowded field to choose from.’
But Romano refused to rise to the barb. He wasn’t particularly offended by her accusation, because it was true. The subterfuge and deceit of his early years had always made obfuscation particularly abhorrent to him. In business as well as in personal matters, he was known for plain speaking, even if it gathered a few enemies along the way. ‘I’m just telling you the truth, Kelly, in case—’
‘What? In case I join that vast number of women you’ve left weeping into their pillow? Rest assured, Romano—look! My eyes are completely dry.’
In an attempt to deflect another unwanted smile, which was hovering at the edges of his lips, he scowled. What did he want from her? Especially now. More sex? Yes, that, of course. The hard pound of his heart was reinforcing just how much he would like to be inside her again, only, this time, to take it more slowly. He would like to prolong the pleasure until she was sobbing out his name, over and over again. For, despite her spiky words, he could see the tremble of her lips, just as he could almost taste the undercurrent of desire which was rippling through the air towards him. But he closed his thoughts to the possibility of a repeat performance, even though her fleshy curves were outlined so invitingly beneath the rumpled bedding.
Because Kelly was different from other lovers and not just because she had been a virgin. She’d been on the periphery of his life for a long time and her role as his sister’s friend and his niece’s godmother would guarantee she’d be rocking up to family events a long way into the future. This one episode could be safely contained, sì . They could write it off as a hot-blooded moment of impetuosity. But having sex with her again would complicate matters and no way should he be contemplating further intimacy just to demonstrate his sexual prowess.
Averting his eyes from the glow of her body, he rose from the bed, determined to put some distance between them and although he couldn’t help notice the disappointment which briefly clouded her features, she didn’t try to stop him. Reaching for his jeans, he forced his mind to race through a calendar of the days ahead. ‘Floriana and her family will be flying to Rome with my stepmother tomorrow—’
‘Which I suppose is when my employment as your cleaner officially begins.’ She tucked her hair behind her ears and gave him an exaggerated smile. ‘I can hardly wait!’
And oh, how he wished she would suddenly announce that she was no longer able to fulfil her obligations. Didn’t he want her to flounce back to England and tell him she never wanted to see him again because of what had just happened? Of course he did. But if she was determined to see the deal through, he could hardly renege on it simply because her beauty and her defiance had called out to something deep within him and he had been weak enough to answer that siren call.
‘Obviously, we are going to have to negotiate how to behave around each other when we are alone in the castello ,’ he said carefully.
‘Is that code for wanting me to appear servile whenever I’m in your presence?’
‘No, it is not,’ he snapped, his conciliatory mood vanquished by her too-smart response. ‘I’m talking about keeping expectations real.’
‘Go on,’ she said.
He nodded, observing her sudden stillness and knowing now was the perfect moment to dash any futile hopes she might be nurturing. ‘I can’t offer you anything permanent, Kelly.’
‘I assume this isn’t about the cleaning job?’
‘You know damned well it isn’t.’ He gave an impatient click of his tongue. ‘I don’t want marriage, or children. I don’t want a family. I’m not looking for someone to share my life.’
He waited for her to challenge him. Or pout. Or do that thing of pillowing her hands behind her head to accentuate her breasts so the pert thrust of her nipples would be outlined provocatively beneath the concealing sheet.
But she didn’t. She didn’t say another word. For how could she possibly be familiar with the post-sexual ploys women used when they were trying to get you to change your mind, when she had been such an innocent?
And he had been the one to take that innocence.
Turing his back on her, he pulled on his jeans, telling himself it was pointless to keep staring into those fathomless eyes, with all their soft green promise.
But wasn’t the real reason for presenting his forbidding back view that he didn’t want her to get any inkling of her sensual power over him? Or to witness the hard spring of his erection and realise just how much he wanted her.