Chapter Two
Maria was utterly lost. Completely and without question. She felt as if she was made up of pure sensual delight, every place she could feel, delicious, every pulse a throb so perfectly pleasurable, it was near inconceivable.
From just a kiss.
Per dio!
She indulged the moan of sheer want creeping up the back of her throat, her mouth opening just a little wider, which Micha took full advantage of. The thrust of his tongue carnal, sending thousands of little shivers across her skin until she trembled from the weight of them.
Her hands fisted in his shirt, pulling it taut across his chest. She wanted it gone.
She wanted the barrier between their skin incinerated.
With shaking fingers, she slipped the buttons of his waistcoat free, her hands stretching out beneath the silk lining, and not so gently scratching the sides of his torso through the cotton of his shirt.
The growl of pleasure against her lips only spurred her on.
Mirroring her hands, his palms moved from her head to her hips, dragging her against him, against the hard ridge of his arousal. The noise she made, primal, instinctive, spun out from her mouth into him, and he turned them, walking her backwards until her backside met the large office table.
He lifted her, effortlessly, up onto the table and pushed his way between her legs in a move that was both possessive and domineering at the same time.
Oh, why was it this man? Why him?
Why was it only Micha who had ever made her this way? This crazy, this aroused, this hedonistic, this wanton?
She closed her eyes, her head falling back as his lips traversed the column of her throat and across her collarbone. Delight fanned out in sparks across her skin, sinking into her blood, her bones, her soul.
If she thought he’d stop, if she thought he’d lift the shirt from the waist of her trousers, she’d been wrong. Instead, with a near ruthless efficiency, he simply hooked his finger around the front of her basque and pulled, exposing her breasts to his sight and her nipples to his tongue.
Wet heat pooled instantly between her thighs and where she would have pulled her legs closed, she instead clamped around Micha’s hips, securing him in place, so that he could tease every single erogenous zone she knew of.
She leaned back to give him more access, his mouth closing over one nipple, over the silk of her shirt, his tongue leaving a damp stain on her breast, cooling to tease the taut flesh as he turned his attention to the other.
Until, he returned hungrily to her mouth.
With one hand on her jaw, and the other swept around her backside, pulling her hard against him, she felt devoured.
Completely and utterly. There was no escape and she wanted none.
Pleasure and pressure were building in her, the restlessness frustrating as what she wanted ebbed and flowed from her reach.
‘Maria.’
Her name, half plea, half promise, on his lips, in his voice…it was as if it had travelled back through the years, drenched from the depths of her memories. She opened her eyes, and saw him gazing back.
Him.
Micha.
The boy who had broken her heart.
She shouldn’t be doing this. She couldn’t. Not again.
She pulled back from his hold, and she saw the moment the shutters came down, cutting her off from the savage heat of the previous moment.
‘This was a mistake,’ she said, scrabbling for the broken shards of her armour and pulling them about her defensively.
‘Don’t do that,’ he warned, with a thread of darkness she’d not heard before.
‘Don’t what?’
‘Don’t demean this,’ he commanded.
‘Why? You did,’ she threw at him as she pushed past him with her shoulder.
Micha reached out and clasped her wrist, stopping her when she would have left, spinning her back to face him.
He had been talking about their kiss, but she was talking about the past. Her fury sparked gold shards of lightning in the depths of her chestnut-coloured eyes.
He’d always been fascinated by the colour, as if one wasn’t enough for her, she needed as many as she could get: browns, golds, some flashes of something near green.
The rest of her family had brown eyes so dark they appeared nearly black. But Maria had inherited her eyes from her mother, who had married into the Gallos. And now, they displayed fury in multicoloured hues.
‘I went where your grandfather sent me,’ Micha ground out.
He refused to think back to that day, that time, when she’d severed his heart, gleefully telling him that she’d do anything to run Gallo Group, knowing that Gio had wanted her to marry Antonio.
Cristo, here she was, exactly eleven years later, ready to do just that.
He’d made the right decision then to leave.
To protect himself and his mother. Because no one else would.
‘You could have said no to him,’ she accused.
This time he did laugh out loud. ‘Yes, cara. Because we all know that Gio would have taken no for an answer.’
‘You could have. You might have been the only one able to do it out of all of us,’ she said, and he wondered whether he saw hurt there in her gaze or whether he was just so desperate to see it that he was imagining it.
‘What about you?’ he returned. ‘When did you ever say no to your grandfather?’
She was shaking her head, sending the tumble of her curls swaying across her shoulders, when he let go of her wrist. Her obtuse denial infuriated him.
‘You deny it? Even now you’re rushing to do his bidding,’ Micha pointed out. ‘You feel nothing more for Antonio than familial love, yet you are going to marry him just as Gio wanted.’
‘I’m going to marry Antonio because I want the company,’ Maria insisted.
‘Why that company? Why not any other company in the entire world? You’re an incredible businesswoman. Your reputation is stellar. You’re respected, financially solvent. Cristo, if you wanted to sell your shares in Gallo Group you would have millions at your disposal.’
You’d be free, he thought internally, the words sounding like an accusation and a plea at the same time.
‘I don’t want another company. I want this one.
I want the one that I should have inherited all along, without having to do some silly tap dance.
I want the one that, had I been born a man, would have been mine without question.
I want the one that I have worked for my entire professional life.
I want,’ she said, her breathing harsh with the fury of her sense of injustice, ‘the company that I have helped grow, whose wealth I have helped increase. I want what I’ve earned, Micha.
I’ve earned Gallo Group. Far more than Antonio, who hasn’t worked in it since he was twenty-one.
Far more than any of the uncles that have sat on the board and done nothing but voted with their wallets. ’
‘Far more than me?’ Micha asked finally when she paused to take a breath.
Maria glared at him, unable to say anything back. Because out of everyone, he was the only other person who had held a candle to what she’d given to Gallo Group. The only other person who could stand at the helm without ruining it—no matter what her family might think of him.
‘Or have you become like the rest of your family and decided that I am far from your equal?’ he said, finally ready to face the truth.
If they were burning bridges, then so be it. He would burn them all.
‘I am not like them,’ she hotly denied.
‘But you don’t think we are equals, do you?’
‘You aren’t family, Micha.’
The punch of air that fell from his lips was the only sign of the way she had cut him off at his knees.
He’d always thought it, but never really wanted to believe it.
But she’d never thought he was good enough.
He wasn’t like Antonio, who’d had the good graces to get himself adopted.
No, no matter what he did, how hard he worked, he’d never shake the stigma of his humble origins, or the depths of what he’d been driven to do for his mother, for himself.
He looked down at her, seeing Maria in a new light. Beautiful, but cruelly removed.
She might think herself better than him, but that didn’t stop her wanting him. And it certainly didn’t stop him wanting her.
‘You might not like me, Maria. Or think me good enough. But you still desire me, don’t you?’ he bit out. ‘That must really sting,’ he said, satisfied by the sight of the flare in her gaze.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she tried to dismiss.
But he wasn’t letting her get away with it. Not this time. If she’d come to kick him out on his backside once she took over the company, then he was going to make her work for it. She was going to have to admit a few things and he wasn’t going to let her go until she had.
‘Oh really? That’s not what those breathy little moans you were making in my ear only moments ago suggested,’ he taunted in a cruel whisper.
He knew how much that would hurt. Because it hurt him too. To want her so much, to be driven to almost demented lengths by the memory of what had been, the knowledge of what could have been and the awareness of what never would be.
‘Go on, tell me how much you hated my kiss,’ he demanded, pressing into her personal space, forcing her back a step.
‘I—’ She searched his gaze, knowing and understanding morphing into frustration. She couldn’t lie, but she wouldn’t admit it either.
‘Tell me, Maria, how much you hated the feel of my mouth on your breast,’ he said, his gaze dropping to her mouth. ‘My touch on your skin.’
‘Micha—’
‘Tell me,’ he said dropping his lips to the shell of her ear, as she hit the wall of the office and had nowhere else to go, ‘how you hated me so much you haven’t fantasised about this for years.’
Her breath poured in and out of her, raising her chest to his again and again, the flush on her cheeks, the pink of her lips so recently kissed, a warning, a flare.
‘I…’ She swallowed, her head leaning up to look at him, her eyes glowing and her skin flushed. ‘I can’t.’