‘I assure you, you don’t,’ he said, smiled, then dropped the smile and shot out an impatient sigh when all she did was to spin her back to him and move on to fling open the next door. ‘Why is it,’ he snapped out, ‘that everyone else gets to enjoy your placid side while I only get the—?’
His voice just stopped. Lizzy didn’t notice. She was too busy taking in the room she had just stepped into filled with the softest light and gentle shadows—and a huge gold-framed portrait hanging from one of the pale blue walls.
‘The virago,’ she murmured, just too stunned to remember that she was supposed to be hunting down some kind of office in this many-roomed mansion. ‘Dear God,’ she added on a thick shaken swallow as her feet took her further into the room.
‘La Contessa Alexandra De Santis,’ Luc’s deep dry voice fed to her from behind. ‘Grande Dame, matriarch, bad mother, wonderful grandmother, and my other virago inglese.’
‘She looks like me,’ Lizzy whispered.
‘I believe Nina said so,’ he returned evenly.
‘But you don’t?’ She was staring up at the face of a breathtakingly beautiful creature who could have come straight out of a Titian painting.
‘Your hair is darker and your eyes are grey, not blue.’
But the shape of her mouth and the small pointed chin and the hourglass shape of her slender figure inside a gentian-blue gown that could only have been fashioned by the finest haute couture looked like Lizzy.
‘How old is she here?’ she asked on a reverent murmur.
‘Forty nine,’ he replied, dragging another gasp from Lizzy’s shocked lips because she looked barely eighteen. ‘My grandfather commissioned the painting as a gift for her fiftieth birthday. He claimed that her beauty was the only thing about her that kept them together. She claimed they stayed together because she allowed it, despite the countless affairs he enjoyed during their long marriage.’
‘She loved him, you mean.’
‘I like to think so, though I don’t believe he deserved such devoted loyalty—and divorce was not heard of in Italian society in their day.’
‘And she made him pay in other ways.’
‘Now that was astute,’ he said after a startled moment.
Because I feel like I know her outside and in, Lizzy thought breathlessly. And I’m standing right here with a man I wouldn’t trust as far as I could pick him up and throw him.
‘You think I am like my grandfather,’ Luc murmured.
And that was astute of him. ‘You take what you want,’ she responded, ‘because you believe you have a right to and you don’t play fair while you do it.’ Turning around, she pushed her chin up. ‘I want to see that photograph now.’
His eyes took their time shifting from the portrait to the determined tilt of her face. What he was thinking didn’t show. If he was still trying to compare her to his grandmother, it didn’t show. If he had decided to marry her because she reminded him of probably the only person he had ever really loved, even that didn’t show.
Hard, tough, unemotional, arrogant, she found herself listing all over again while she stood waiting for his response. The fact that she’d just realised he had a title attached to his name, though she’d never heard anyone use it, only added more reason as to why he was like he was.
Her heart began to thump oddly because he still wasn’t saying anything and she was damned if she was going to back down now—even if there was something going on in those implacable golden eyes that she did not quite understand or like.
‘We keep fighting,’ he said finally.
Lizzy nodded, lips pinned together.
‘And you persist in believing that you can win.’
Well, give up on that belief and she might as well lie down and let him trample all over her. ‘I can use a computer, so if you just point me in the right direction …’ she prompted.
He smiled. It wasn’t a condescending smile, but neither was it pleasant. If she could see herself she’d probably be backing off, but she could not see how the defiant tilt of her chin was making her spiralling hair flame around her face or that the rounded shape of her breasts was moving too fast inside her top, nor was she aware that her nipples had sprung into two tantalisingly tight teasing buds.
He was aware, though, aware enough to allow his body to respond to temptation, aware enough to enjoy drawing out the tension between them until her eyelashes feathered down on her cheeks as she dropped her eyes from his.
She found her gaze settling on his throat. It was that taut golden throat that had been the cause of all her problems, she reminded herself. And the still vivid memory of her lips brushing against it made her suddenly burn to place her lips there again. It was a shock—her whole fascination with his throat was a bewildering puzzle she just could not understand. Yet it was there pulsing away with its bad temptation for her to just lean in and—
Maybe a retreat was sometimes a good idea, she heard herself think in a tense, anxious backtrack. ‘I think I’ll go and—’
‘Coward.’ He laughed softly—and moved so fast she didn’t see it coming until she was already locked into his embrace and his mouth was hungry on hers.
It was a hot kiss, a long and demanding and seriously, seriously deep kind of kiss. When it was over she was breathless, the front of her body pressing into him with a soft and needy intimacy that brought a flush to her cheeks, and her only comfort was that she could feel the sense drenching evidence of his response pressing against her.
‘I wish you would stop just grabbing me like this!’ she managed to push out on a stifled whisper.
‘I don’t play fair,’ he reminded her dryly, and captured her mouth again. By the time this one was over she was trembling against him and her fingers were clutching at the back of his neck.
‘Fast or slow?’ he husked, still toying sensually with the cushion soft heat of her mouth. ‘Fast means we rip our clothes off and get very basic right here against the wall or down on the floor. Slow means we try to make it to the privacy of our bedroom. You choose.’
Choose? ‘I don’t know,’ Lizzy mumbled helplessly. ‘I’m not very good at all of this.’
‘Trust me, cara, you are very good at it,’ he responded harshly, though harsh in this case was very sexy.
So sexy she gave in to, and leant in to let her tongue make a half-clumsy slide on his taut golden skin. His rasping curse was exciting. The way his hands took hold of her by the waist and put her away from him brought a whispered, ‘Sorry,’ shaking from her lips.
He just grabbed hold of her hand and began trailing her behind him into the hallway, the decision apparently made for her as to where the rest of this was going to take place. He towed her up the stairs and into the bedroom. Shutting the door behind them, he then towed her over to the bed and propped her up against one of the posts.
‘Don’t move,’ he said as he took a step back from her.
Lizzy only wished that she had the power to move, but she didn’t. She just leant there and watched as he began to strip his clothes off. Dark olive skin wearing the gloss of warmth and the taut muscle formation that rippled as he moved was revealed to her in swift degrees. His tee shirt—gone, his long fingers dragging her eyes down the cluster-dark arrow of hair on his torso to watch, in churning anticipation, him unfasten his trousers and strip them away. He wore flat loafers that he heeled off and kicked to one side, no socks to cover his long brown feet. Only one item of clothing was left on his body, and her breathing grew piercingly tight as he stripped that away too.
‘You like what you see?’ he demanded silkily.
Lizzy glossed her lips with her tongue and nodded.
‘You wish to lick me some more?’
‘Yes, please,’ she breathed.
He took that step back towards her, so impossibly beautiful and arrogant and powerful he made her heart pump deliriously.
‘Enjoy,’ he invited, and she couldn’t believe how quickly she moved towards him, she couldn’t believe it wa
s she who was so eagerly touching him with her fingers, tasting him with her tongue and grazing his flesh with her teeth, while he stood there, passively allowing her with his hands grasping the bedpost so she was trapped in the circle of his arms.
Though he wasn’t really passive—he flinched and flexed and breathed tautly to every move she made on him. When she stretched up for his mouth he gave it, when she bravely dared to run her fingers down through the mat of hair and explore the length of his erection, the velvet-smooth length jerked and pulsed.
And he was breathing as unevenly as she was, the tension in him clenching his muscles tight. When she flung her arms around his neck and just clung, he seemed to see it as some kind of surrender because he muttered something in Italian, then took control. Her skirt ripped because he couldn’t be bothered to find the zip on it. As she gasped in shock it landed in a warm heap at her feet, and he was already bending down to strip away her panties. The hungry intrusion of his tongue between her legs before he straightened up again drew a keening cry from her throat. Her top went next, sliding over her head and disappearing out of her line of vision, her breasts bouncing as he released them from her bra. He caught them up in the cups of his long fingers, nothing prepared her for the hot wave of pleasure that danced through her as his mouth ravished their tender, tight peaks.
If this was slow in his estimation, it wasn’t in Lizzy’s. It was hot and passionately fast. Her fingers bit into the solid strength of his biceps, and she trembled and writhed, and kept her eyes closed because that way everything felt so much more powerful. When he finally tumbled her down onto the bed her slender legs parted so she could feel the full impact of him when he stretched himself out on top of her.
For a full sense-locking second she thought he was just going to take her right now like this, and she was shocked by how much she wanted him to. But he didn’t. Slow came in an agony of new experiences; she was a physical, sensual, trembling wreck by the time he decided it was time.
And this was no coupling, she found herself thinking hazily as he came inside her with a long, slow, probing push that took the breath from her lungs. It was a hot, deep, passionate lovemaking where the two of them became one single unit moving and breathing and finally reaching the agonised beauty of perfect pleasure, which left her skin and her nerves and her muscles and even her bones a livened, quivering, warm liquid heap.
And his kiss this time lingered, his arms the tower of strength she clung to as he slowly brought her back to earth. I will never be able to let another man do this to me, she thought hazily, and had no idea that she’d whispered the thought out loud.
She only knew that something made him begin the whole, long, sensual journey all over again. They spent the whole afternoon like that—making love. They did not dress. They did not leave their room. They showered together and lazed together and stroked and kissed and made love together and eventually slept together in an intimately relaxed tangle of limbs.
CHAPTER NINE
HE WAS STRANGE, Lizzy found herself thinking again, as she watched Luc stand out in the hot sunlight deep in discussion with one of the island farmers, while she sat on the shady porch of a tiny blue-painted farmhouse, sipping at a tall glass of something cool and slightly odd-tasting the farmer’s wife had brought out for her to quench her thirst.
He had three definite settings as far as she had been able to work out in the two weeks they’d been on the island. Cool and sophisticated, as on the couple of occasions he’d condescended to let her into the company of friends he had here. Or serious and deep, as he was being now while he listened intently to what the farmer was explaining to him. Then there was so hot and passionate she’d sometimes wondered if she was going to survive the demands he made on her body and her senses. Especially in the warm dead of night when he would wake her up because he needed her there and then with no space given for her to refuse.
If she could refuse, which she’d discovered she couldn’t.
She was hooked on Luciano De Santis, she mused satirically as her eyes drifted over his wide shoulders pressed against the white of his tee shirt that hugged his torso all the way down to the narrow band of his cargo shorts. Naked, he was—colossal. Dressed, he was just too sexy to be real, even in a pair of baggy knee length shorts that had seen better days.
The old sting set up its usual flurry low in her abdomen as she slid her gaze down what was left on show of his long tanned legs. A man’s legs, she observed. Strong and sturdy, peppered with dark hair and tightened by the muscular formation she knew for a fact was capable of crushing her in two.
Moving her eyes all the way back up him again, she saw the slight twitch he gave with his shoulders and knew he knew she was looking at him. It was like that between them now—a constant awareness that flowed across space like a magnetic vibration. Taking another absent gulp at her odd tasting drink she wondered if it all would still be there once they returned to reality the day after tomorrow.
Milan, not her other comfort zone on the shores of Lake Como. The real world in which Luc would slip back into his busy life and she would …
The chain of her thoughts stopped right there because she didn’t know what she was going to do. She didn’t know what they were going to go back to. Luc had kept the real world out of their time here, probably because he too was unsure himself as to what to expect out there.
She didn’t even know if Bianca and Matthew had reappeared. She hadn’t spoken to her father at all—hadn’t wanted to and Luc hadn’t encouraged her to ring him. And after their altercation about their wedding picture on their first day here she hadn’t bothered to bring up the subject again because—well, she’d discovered that she preferred to pretend that all of this was the true reality and out there was the fantasy.
He turned to look at her then, so deliciously gorgeous she felt her heart squeeze to an aching standstill. He’d been in an unusually sober mood all day, and that mood still reflected in the golden eyes he lowered to the half drunk glass in her hand, then lifted back to her too expressive eyes.
I love you, she was thinking, and just hoped to goodness he couldn’t read that as he walked towards her, the farmer having been distracted by his mobile phone.
‘Would you mind if I finished that for you?’ He took the glass from her without waiting for an answer and downed what was left of the drink before she could tell him that the farmer’s wife had prepared a glass full for him too.
Beautifully polite and arrogantly insolent all in one sexy package, she thought as she watched him grimace as if the drink had tasted odd to him too.
He had taken her everywhere with him during the last fortnight. She’d met very rich friends and very poor farmers and to a man they’d all treated her the same way, with warm smiles and welcomes that reflected their feelings for him—and his grandmother, since everyone had also commented on how much she looked like the late Contessa De Santis.
The farmer’s wife came out on the porch and started chatting to him in Cajun while Lizzy sat and listened. She didn’t care that she couldn’t understand a word they were saying, she just loved to listen to the attractive dip and flow of their voices—especially Luc’s.
‘How many languages do you speak?’ she asked him later as they drove away in the open-top sports car with her pink hat firmly in place on her head.
‘I don’t know,’ he answered casually. ‘I pick languages up easily.’ He added a throw-away shrug as if it didn’t mean a lot.
But it did mean a lot. It said an awful lot about him. He was the true international high-flying businessman, cultured, educated, refined—supremely comfortable inside his own skin. Curling her legs beneath her on the seat, she turned to study his honey-gold profile, a smile playing with her mouth.
‘What?’ he said, turning a glance on her.
‘Arrogant,’ she murmured.
‘I thought we had already established that.’ He looked back at the road again.
‘Conceited, then, if you think it’s o
kay to shrug away the fact that you’re fluent in a million languages.’
‘A million?’ He sent her a sexily lazy grin. ‘You have a quaint way of offering me a compliment, cara. And you have your own amazing talents.’
‘Like what?’ Lizzy scoffed. ‘Wearing hair-clashing hot pink because you like it?’
‘That is certainly one of them.’ He nodded with a grin. ‘Then there is your talent for being quiet and unobtrusive when we are with other people, which only adds to your air of mystique.’
‘Mystique?’ Lizzy grimaced. ‘I’m just shy, you know that.’
‘Except with me …’ the sunlight glossed his dark hair as he sent her a grin ‘…which is when another of your amazing talents puts in an appearance—the wildly passionate and sometimes downright provocative you, like you’re being now.’
‘I am not being provocative!’ Lizzy protested.
‘What would you call the way you are sitting there curled in that seat like an innocent kitten when you know your skirt has ridden up to the tops of your thighs?’
‘You have a one-track mind.’ She tugged the skirt down.
‘You make sure that I have. And,’ he went on without any noticeable alteration in his tone to warn her as to what was coming, ‘you have another amazing talent that really impresses me because I don’t know another person who can knock back more than one mouthful of Martha’s rum punch and still walk a straight line, never mind have a sensible conversation.’
Lizzy’s eyes widened and her mouth dropped open only to close again when her tongue made a searching curl of the taste buds inside her mouth. ‘So that was the odd taste I detected?’
‘Martha’s very own home-made rum.’ He nodded. ‘Now I am sitting here driving the two of us back to the house as quickly as I can so I can get you into bed before the full effect kicks in.’
‘Rum,’ Lizzy repeated, and even as she did she felt the first worrying stirrings begin to seep into her blood. She’d had rum once before—and only once because the effect Luc spoke about had been so—
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