Chapter Eight #2
She would normally have relished the foot-long hot dog but all she could think of was having dinner with Alessandro, not knowing what he would say, not knowing how she would react.
It was a full day.
No dinner for Flora, who had done sterling work with her hot dog and was full.
They took it easy after lunch, strolling through the park, people-watching and then heading to one of the resort beaches, where they enjoyed looking at the boats bobbing in the water while having pineapple whips.
They ended up on the monorail back to the hotel, by which time Flora was dead on her feet.
‘But I’m not tired,’ she half heartedly protested, stifling a wide yawn.
‘Said the very tired little girl, stumbling around on very tired little legs,’ Georgie teased, reaching for her hand and volunteering bedtime duties with a sideways look at Alessandro.
He looked even more sexily bronzed after time in the sun. He was wearing a white polo shirt and a pair of cream chinos. He could have stepped straight off the cover of a men’s magazine.
He had changed and was waiting for her when, an hour later, she emerged from her rooms, showered and changed and dreading whatever conversation was brewing. Or was dread the right word? She wished it were but excited felt disturbingly closer to the mark.
The relaxed, amused look on his face didn’t help. He handed her a glass of wine and for a few minutes they recapped the day.
‘So, spit it out,’ Georgie said, cutting to the chase and building some Dutch courage by drinking her wine very quickly and then accepting a top-up.
‘Georgie, don’t look so apprehensive. I know you want to bury what happened between us—’
‘Nothing did happen between us!’
‘Absolutely nothing happened between us,’ Alessandro agreed, relaxing back in the chair and gazing at her mulish expression and lowered eyes.
‘So there’s nothing to talk about.’
‘There’s everything to talk about because the nothing that happened opened a door to the something that should have.’
‘No!’
It’s not a crime for us to admit that we’re attracted to one another.’
‘I… I…’
‘Are you going to deny it?’
‘It doesn’t matter! It doesn’t matter, if there’s some inexplicable…you know what I mean.’
‘Can’t bring yourself to say it? Shall I help you? Chemistry? Powerful attraction? Sizzling, suffocating electric charge…?’
She’d sat on the sofa while he’d taken a chair but now he stood up, slowly and with the sort of economic grace that made him so compelling, and went to sit right next to her.
‘Tell me, Georgie,’ he said huskily. ‘Tell me it doesn’t matter when you can reach out and touch me and know that I’ll touch you back. Wherever you want me to touch you.’
‘Don’t.’
She covered her ears with her hands and he very gently removed them and kept them loosely in his. He looked at her seriously.
‘Did he break your heart that much that you can’t move on, Georgie? Are you going to let him determine the rest of your life?’
‘I’m not doing that!’
‘Aren’t you?’
‘You should talk,’ she flung at him. ‘Aren’t you guilty of doing the very same thing?’
‘My heart was never broken by my ex-wife,’ Alessandro returned kindly. ‘My heart was broken long before that, but it didn’t set me on a path of pursuing some impossible dream where love conquers all. I realised that the only thing that conquers everything is discipline and self-control.’
‘With the exception of Flora,’ Georgie said softly and her heart did a little flip as his expression softened.
‘She’s everything,’ Alessandro admitted.
‘And, of course, my mother, but when it comes to romance? Love? I don’t have the same faith in that as you seem to.
I prefer the option of living for today and enjoying what’s here without muddying the water by projecting into some time in a distant future and what might or might not work then. ’
‘I don’t project into the future.’
‘Of course you do. Isn’t that what you’re doing now?
Writing off this unexpected attraction between us because it doesn’t fit into your theory of what should happen next in your life with a man?
Because you were hurt once and so the best bet is to batten down the hatches and only allow Mr Right in? ’
‘That’s not what I’m doing…’ Yes, it was, but how could she trust her heart not to be hurt again?
She’d spent so long hiding behind an act of being the party girl who didn’t care that boys didn’t look at her in that way, but she had cared and now this guy…
a heartbreaker who didn’t even believe in love… !
‘Are you prepared to see your youth disappear in an eternal quest for a guy who might or might not exist? Or worse, for a guy who might end up being a clone of the one who hurt you? There’s a reason why so many marriages end in divorce.
Nine times out of ten, Mr Right turns out to be Mr Completely and Utterly Wrong. ’
‘You’re so cynical.’
‘I’m a realist and I’m not scared to admit that I want to sleep with you.
I can’t promise love. To be more precise, love is the one thing I can categorically not promise.
But sex? I’ll show you the meaning of fun.
Up for the challenge, Georgie, or will you scuttle away in mortal terror? I’ll only ask once…’
Georgie had such a vivid picture of Alessandro, naked next to her, his body so deeply burnished next to her pale one, that she wanted to pass out.
‘You’re tempted…’
Was he right? What was wrong with a bit of fun? She knew the stakes. She wouldn’t be hurt…
‘I’m really not that kind of girl,’ she protested half-heartedly.
In that moment, Alessandro knew that he’d won. She wanted him. The soft yielding in her voice was an aphrodisiac that sent his body into hot overdrive.
‘I know you’re not,’ he said roughly. ‘Come to bed with me.’ He stood up, glanced towards the adjoining door where Flora was fast asleep. He held out his hand and stifled a groan of anticipated pleasure when she slipped her small hand into his.
‘I don’t know how long I’ve been thinking about this…
thinking about you.’ He shut the bedroom door behind them, locked it just in case, moved to close the curtains so that the room was suddenly plunged into shadows and darkness.
He switched on the light by the bed and looked at her. ‘Don’t be nervous.’
‘I’ve seen those pictures of you…catwalk models draped all over you…’ But, nerves or not, she’d crept to the bed and sat, drawing her knees up to her chest and wrapping her arms around them to stare at him.
‘I’ve never been this turned on in my life before.’
He began undressing and Georgie looked at him in open fascination.
He’d been thinking about this? If he could get inside her rebellious head, he’d find that she’d been thinking about it for an equally long time. Maybe since he’d first surprised her in his house and she’d looked at him as though she’d never seen a man in her life before.
He was half naked now and her heart was beating madly. Broad shoulders, sprinkling of hair in all the right places, a bronzed and hard and unapologetically masculine body.
This was a guy with zero feminine streak.
He was watching her, watching him, and as he stepped out of his trousers, it was obvious from the impressive bulge in his boxers that he was as turned on by her as she was by him.
For the first time Georgie knew what it felt like to be truly desired by a man who had eyes only for her and it was liberating.
She knelt on the bed and waged war with her top, finally pulling it off, and then she reached behind to unclasp the something-and-nothing bra she really didn’t even have to wear because there was so little to put inside.
The air-conditioning was on and the cold made her nipples stiffen.
‘Carry on,’ Alessandro murmured, strolling to stand by the side of the bed in just his black boxers, low-slung enough for her to see the line of hair that arrowed down from his belly button. ‘Don’t let me stop you. I’m already loving what I’m seeing.’
He reached inside the boxers and held himself, stroking and looking at her and, honestly, it was the most erotic thing she’d ever experienced in her whole life.
He hoisted her so that he could tug down the culottes, leaving her in some prim white cotton underwear, which couldn’t have been sexier. Georgie was as nervous as a kitten and yet the excitement of this once-in-a-lifetime desire was beating inside her like a drum.
When their eyes met and held, when he lowered his head to trail his tongue against her neck…she wasn’t nervous any longer. She felt free.
She leant back with a low moan and wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him against her so that they toppled back.
She traced the ridge of his spine with her fingers and luxuriated in his muscled shoulders, the hard bulge of his biceps and then the firmness of his narrow waist.
‘How are you so fit?’ she murmured. ‘I haven’t seen you use the gym once since we’ve been here. Do you work out?’
‘All the time. It’s an addiction.’
‘Really?’
‘No. I never work out. I ski when I can, run when I can and box when I can but I usually can’t. Time is money. Touch me…right…there… That feels so good…’
Georgie propelled him back and then she devoted herself to touching what she’d wanted to touch for ages.
She showered his neck with kisses, flicked her tongue over his shoulder blades and then over the flat brown nipples, which elicited a groan of pleasure from him.
She revelled in his body. She played with him, teasing his foreskin slowly until he covered her hand with his, tightly, stopping her because he was on the verge of losing it.
‘But I’d like to see you lose it,’ she whispered on a husky laugh as he flipped her over so that he was now in the driver’s seat.
‘Why?’
He didn’t give her time to answer. Instead, he pinned her hands above her head and reared up to look down at her with an appreciative smile.
‘The more I see, the more I like.’ He explored her body inch by gradual inch.