And all she could think was, You weren’t invisible to him after all.
She almost felt herself shatter into pieces at that notion alone.
And then she was shivering all over, everywhere, as he slid his palms up the back of her legs. Not quite gently. Not quite softly. And the firm pressure was all about heat and want, making her delirious. Making her ripe and half-mad with that drumming desire.
It was only when he slid his hands down the length of her legs again that she realized he’d pushed up her skirt and left it bunched up at her waist.
She felt a wallop of that bright hot pulsing thing that had nearly knocked her over in the hall. It was mixed now with the image of what she must look like, bent over his bed in such a wanton display, with only the bright red thong she wore between them.
Julienne was breathing so hard now that it was all she could hear. That gasping thing not quite a breath, high and wild.
“Feel free to bite down on the linens,” Cristiano told her, dark and amused. “I won’t tell.”
She didn’t bite down. But she did grip the soft bedclothes beneath her, twisting the outrageously soft material into fists.
His fingers moved beneath her thong, almost absently, when she could feel the intensity coming off of him in waves. She felt him peel it down her leg, then tug it from one ankle. But not the other, and she understood—with another wallop—that he’d left her thong there.
How must she look...?
She was naked from the waist down, wearing only her impractical heels with her lacy red thong at one ankle. And she was making that sound. And his shoulders were between her legs, tipping her forward even more and lifting her at the same time, so she was braced even more fully on the bed—
“Oh, God,” she moaned, as understanding slammed into her with all the force of a train.
“There you go,” he murmured.
Approvingly.
And she could hear him well enough, but worse—or better—his mouth was right there. Right there at her core, where she felt herself clenching, melting, shuddering—
Then Cristiano took her in his mouth from behind, like an overripe peach.
And ate her like dessert.
And this time, when she exploded, she screamed.
Sometime later, he rolled her over. Julienne lay there, splayed wide, because she couldn’t seem to get her limbs to work. Nor could she manage to care about that strange paralysis the way she knew she should.
All the while her heart clattered so hard against her ribs that she was worried they might crack. Or she would.
She had the vague sense that he was moving, but then he was touching her again. Stripping her, she worked out after a moment, with a ruthless efficiency that made her shiver all over again.
“Cristiano...” she murmured.
“Good girl,” he replied.
She had no idea why that made her want to sob. Though she couldn’t have said, if her life depended upon it, what sort of sob that might have been. Another explosion of sensation. Or a deep well of something that had ached inside her for much too long now, too fiercely to be sadness.
All of the above, she said to herself.
At least, she thought it was to herself. It was impossible to tell.
And then he was crawling over her, tasting her as he went.
No part of her was safe from him, and she felt blazingly hot. Gloriously alight and alive. She tasted him too, so male and hard. Until she was sure they both glowed in the dark with the force of this endless temptation, wild and needy.
She wanted it to go on and on forever.
And then she felt him, hard and huge against her hip.
She realized she must have made a noise when he laughed again, softly.
“You’re going to take all of me, Julienne,” he told her, with that quiet certainty that made her doubt—not for the first time—that she was really going to survive this. Not in one piece, anyway. Not intact. But she’d known that before she’d come here, hadn’t she? Not the particulars of how, exactly, he would ruin her. Only that he would. “Do you understand?”
All Julienne could do was nod. She didn’t know if she was apprehensive, or desperate—but this time, in a whole new way. She wanted to prove to him that she could do exactly that. That she could do whatever he wanted, whatever he needed.
He smiled again, and it was even more devastating than before.
And she was such a fool. Had she really worried that the sight of his smile might make her swoon?
If only.
The sad truth of her situation was like another wallop, and now it was connected to that molten fire between her legs, the pounding of her heart, and the dark, demanding man propped up over her.
She had fallen hopelessly in love with this man when she was sixteen years old. She had loved him with all the mad fervency of a teenage girl, because she’d been one. And more, with the unwavering passion a girl could only have for the hero who had saved her.
It had never wavered. Over the years, it had grown stronger. Deeper.
Until even her own sister despaired of her.
Tonight was meant to be the cure. Because no man could possibly live up to the fantasies in her head. Julienne knew that. She’d been sure of it.
And tonight was nothing like her fantasies, it was true.
Cristiano was far, far better than she ever could have imagined.
And she could see the vast gulf between the teenage crush she’d had on him all this time and the reality that was this. Him. His ruthless physicality. His rampant, commanding masculinity, his certainty in her responses and his dark demands.
God help her, but she was lost.
He thrust into her then, a slow and steady ruthlessness that had her coming apart at the feel of it. The thickness. That deep, aching stretch. The tug of it, there at her entrance, that he barely heeded.
Then the ruthless, peremptory way he seated himself deep inside her, looked down at her face and smiled.
Julienne shattered all around him. She loved him with every last inch of her woman’s body, shattering what was left of her teenage heart and loving him all the more with the far darker, far more complicated adult heart that remained.
Fantasies were nothing next to this.
She shook and she shook, and she heard his name on her lips.
A song she’d already been singing for a decade, and would likely keep singing all the days of her life.
She told herself she accepted it. She needed to accept it.
Cristiano gathered him to her, laughing again. It was dark music to her ears, she buckled anew, and only then did he begin to move.
And Julienne lost track of the things she sobbed, or the times she screamed. He was insatiable, and he was thorough. He taught her things she was sure she could never put into words, so she used the only one that she could remember.
His name.
It could have been hours or whole lifetimes when he finally rolled her over for the last time, pulled her knees up high and let himself go.
And it was her name she heard then, roared out into the crook of her neck as he found his own release.
One more thing that she would hoard, later.
One more piece of treasure to tuck away.
* * *
He had said one night, and he used every last scrap of it.
Julienne woke as the first hint of dawn crept across the sky, and had no idea how she was supposed to go on. Not now she knew.
She’d come here to exorcise her own, personal demons. And instead, she had lost herself all the more. Irrevocably.
But none of that mattered, because they had agreed.
One night.
“You need your own life,” Fleurette had told her, time and again. “Not his life, his company, his world. You’re not a princess lo
cked away in a tower, waiting for some fool to ride up on a white horse. That’s what Annette dreamed of, you know. Every time she went out. And look what happened.”
Julienne had always agreed, safe in the knowledge that it was easy enough to agree with whatever Fleurette said as long as she still had to pay him back. And could therefore agree and also carry on doing what she was doing.
But she’d paid him back in full before she’d met him in the bar last night, transferring the last of the money to the account she’d set up for that purpose. He had bought her, in a sense, but she had bought herself back.
She was sure that once she recovered from this night—once she walked away from him, reminded herself how to breathe, and found her way into the new life she planned to build for herself far away from the Cassara Corporation or anything that reminded her of Monaco and the girl she’d been when she’d come here the first time—she would treasure that.
You will have to, she told herself, a new sob building inside her.
She twisted in the bed, looking over her shoulder to where Cristiano slept.
Even in sleep, he looked stern. Unyielding.
Both of which he’d proved himself to be, over and over again.
Julienne didn’t let herself touch him again. Because she knew that if she did, she would never manage to tear herself away.
Instead she pressed one palm hard against her treacherous heart.
One night, he had said.
And any emotional complications she had were her own.
She made herself get up, then pull on her clothes. She picked up her shoes in one hand, then found her way out through the maze of rooms toward that entryway where he’d feasted on her like a wild thing.
Julienne shuddered all over again, instantly hot and wet and ready. She lectured herself as she looked in the mirror, dismayed to find that she did not look nearly as rumpled and used as she thought she should. Her hair was wild, but it was easily tamed. She smoothed it back, then tied it into a knot.
And then she looked the way she always did.
As if nothing had changed. As if she was somehow the same person she’d been when she’d walked in here last night.
When the truth was, she had saved herself for the only man she had ever looked at twice. The only man she had ever loved. She’d saved herself for him, and he had taken her as ruthlessly as he did everything, none the wiser.
And as she let herself out of the hotel room, closing the door quietly behind her, Julienne found herself smiling.
It was hardly on par with rescuing a sixteen-year-old girl from prostituting herself, but it was a gift in return for a gift all the same.
He had protected her innocence all those years ago. And last night she had joyfully, happily, given it to him.
“You can move on now,” she told herself, ignoring the way her heart thudded so painfully in her chest. She leaned down to slip on one shoe, then the next. And she could still feel him everywhere, the rasp of his rough jaw on her inner thighs. His hard, gloriously male hands so big and bold against her skin. “It’s over now, Julienne. You’ll move on.”
You will have to, came the voice inside, too much like her sister’s.
And she made herself walk away—from Monaco, from her sordid past, from the Cassara Corporation, and from Cristiano himself—without looking back.
CHAPTER FOUR
Six months later
CRISTIANO SCOWLED DOWN at his mobile as he crossed the Piazza del Duomo, then shoved it into his pocket. It was a blustery spring evening in Milan, and he had no intention of answering the call coming in. Or any call, because he did not wish to risk getting sucked back into the latest set of fires he would be duty bound to extinguish tonight.
And tonight he had other plans. Tonight he thought he might spend some time in his home for a change. The glorious penthouse that was as sleek and modern and stark as he liked, with no hint of sweetness. No chocolate. And best of all, not in his office. He thought he might try his hand at pretending he was a real man with a real life, instead of the walking, talking embodiment of the Cassara Corporation.
He would never admit such a thing aloud, and certainly not in a place like Milan where his grandfather had worked so very hard for so long and had admirers everywhere, but sometimes he wondered if he might not take a great deal of pleasure in watching it all burn.
Another vicious little thought that should have been unworthy of him. He filed that away with the rest of them, the evidence of who he really was no matter how he tried to pretend otherwise, and shoved his hands into the pockets of his coat.
As if he needed any more proof that he was his father’s son, through and through.
Still, he collected each and every damning morsel himself. And kept a very thorough dossier, right there where his heart ought to be.
And he was thinking about all the ways he’d failed himself and his grandfather’s memory again when he saw her.
One more thing he was sick of, he thought with an internal snarl, when the initial kick of it passed.
Cristiano loved women. He loved sex. And he indulged himself, one night at a time. He had never wanted more than one night with anyone. Ever.
And yet he had spent six months being haunted by that single night he’d spent with Julienne Boucher in Monaco.
He’d woken up that morning after to find Julienne gone, and had hated the fact that her absence hadn’t brought him the usual peace or satisfaction. Instead, he’d been forced to acknowledge the distinctly unsavory truth.
He, Cristiano Cassara, had wanted more.
Had he woken to find her still there in his bed, he would have broken every last one of his rules and indulged himself further.
It was unthinkable and unprecedented—but that didn’t make the unfamiliar urge any less real.
He’d assured himself that the odd need in him he’d never felt before, that ravenous hunger, would fade. Give it a week’s time, he’d told himself confidently as he’d left Monaco with no plans to return, and he would forget her like all the rest.
But he didn’t.
He saw Julienne’s face everywhere. A gleaming bit of caramel-colored hair and he was instantly distracted. The turn of a particular cheek, soft and elegant, and he trailed off in the middle of a sentence—no matter what he happened to be doing. Negotiating deals, handling problems, whatever.
She would not leave him alone, and yet she was nowhere to be found.
It was a nuisance. It was madness.
And it didn’t fade with time.
Julienne’s letter of resignation had been on his desk in Milan, as promised. She had left a dutiful forwarding address—the Manhattan residence she’d used throughout her tenure at the Cassara Corporation. But when, a month or so later, Cristiano had broken and actually attempted to contact her there, it turned out she’d moved on again.
This time, with no forwarding details.
She had turned into his own, personal ghost.
When Cristiano had never believed in ghosts before.
And so he scowled at the woman there in the piazza, wearing an overly bulky coat and an unnecessary scarf as if it was the dead of winter instead of April, because it wasn’t her. It was never her.
Except this time, the caramel-haired woman in question held his gaze. And smiled back.
The bright red ribbon inside him that he’d been calling self-loathing brightened, then. And shifted into a new kind of fury.
He didn’t know what else to call it.
Cristiano realized he had come to a complete stop. And was now standing perfectly still, his eyes locked to hers across the coming dusk. He was vaguely aware of the usual crowds that flocked to the piazza. Tourists and locals alike, gazing up at the ancient cathedral and taking photographs of its spires. But all he saw was Julienne.
That smile.
And, as he watched, it shifted from some kind of greeting, laced with hope if he had to characterize it, into that cool weapon he recalled from the bar in Monaco.
Either way, she made his body tighten into a hard, driving greed.
She was standing still herself, her gaze on him and that puffy down coat arranged around her like a circus tent.
It suggested to him that she’d been standing out here a long while.
Cristiano was moving then, cutting through the crowd, or perhaps it was simply that they leaped out of the way of a man with that much hunger on his face.
He kept his gaze trained on Julienne, half-convinced that if he so much as blinked she might disappear like smoke.
Then he was standing before her, astonished at the new kind of greed that swelled in him. He wanted to get his hands on her again—that hadn’t changed—but it was more than that. For a moment, he was content simply to gaze at her.
Like a puppy, a cold voice inside him chimed in.
A voice he recognized, snide and sneering. Like Giacomo at his worst.
Cristiano clenched his jaw, fighting back the darker urges inside him, because that was the point, wasn’t it? It wasn’t the urges that mattered. It wasn’t the part of him that could match his father’s snideness all too easily. He knew those things existed. It was what he did with them that mattered, surely.
“Julienne,” he made himself say, by way of greeting. As if this was a business meeting that required his cold ruthlessness, and had nothing to do with that smile. “There must be a reason you are lurking about out here in the elements. I’m astonished you felt the urge to play tourist on such a wet, cold evening.”
“I’m an excellent tourist, actually,” she replied, and he was sure he saw some trace of emotion in her toffee-colored eyes. Here a moment, then gone. “But that’s not why I’m here.”
“Dare I flatter myself that you have come back to Milan to see me?” He couldn’t help the iciness in his tone. The frigid bite of it. Maybe he didn’t want to help himself. “You know where the Cassara offices are located, do you not? And last I checked you knew where my residence was located as well. Surely either choice would be more appropriate than stalking me in the shadow of the Duomo.”
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