by Lucy Ellis
Throwing her off the cliff in a sack would have been the way one of his ancestors would have dealt with her.
He would have to be more creative.
He pulled the tarpaulin cover off the bike, kicked out the stand and pushed it onto the road.
She wasn’t like any woman he’d ever known. Something about fighting with her was turning him on, and he was a man who made it a point of honour not to involve himself in disputes with women. He’d seen too many of them growing up, between his parents. They were inevitably messy and emotional, and a man never won.
No, women didn’t fight with him... They pouted and sulked and made silly little threats, but in the end they did exactly what they were supposed to do. Looked good and provided a little light entertainment.
Yet in the last two days he’d been angered, provoked, amazed, and he was in the grip of a powerful combination of feelings—primarily sexual. Si, he could vouch for the sexual, and it was definitely starting to become painful.
Dressed as she was, spitting insults at him, the antithesis of everything feminine and polished—he still wanted her with a fierce pull that was beyond his previous experience.
That she seemed utterly ignorant of her power over him was the saving grace.
Although he was beginning to think even that was wilful.
Crazy woman. He started the bike up. It purred like a kitten. A slow smile curved his mouth. She’d love this. She could hardly sulk on the back of the Ducati.
* * *
‘Grazie bene. Molto bene. This has been most kind of you.’
Having exhausted her schoolgirl Italian, Ava waited and waved to the old man as he made his way back down the path towards a stone foundry.
She stood in the dappled sunshine by a water pump, wondering what Gianluca was doing. Probably at the hotel already, kicking back with some sort of exotic drink and a blonde who, in Ava’s imagination, resembled to the letter Donatella... He’d probably sent some lackey looking for her when he’d found her gone, so he didn’t have to explain to his precious family how he’d lost her.
Screwing up her face, she mimicked the blonde in her mind. Oh, Gianluca, you’re so wonderful, everything you do is wonderful, let me take off more clothing...
She ground her teeth together.
Far better that she concentrated on what she could improve for herself. It had been a long day, and it wasn’t over by a long shot. She should take this time to regroup, not to fixate on Gianluca Benedetti’s sex life and her lack of one.
It was private here, cooler too. Paolo had told her she was welcome to stay as long as she wished, but they would be leaving at five, using an old track direct to the village, and she was welcome to go with them. He’d given her a clay jug to fill with water and she concentrated on filling it.
She had no intention of hanging around. She’d essay that track by herself. But first she wanted to freshen up. She felt hot and sweaty in her clothes, but something about concentrating on the water splashing into the jug was bringing her a measure of peace.
After a quick reconnaissance of the area she determined she was alone and removed her shirt. She splashed cold water from the tap all over her arms and back, chest and belly. It trickled into the waistband of her accursed trousers and she was oh so tempted to rip them off too. But that would have to wait until she was behind a closed door. She determined one thing. When she got back to Sydney she was making a bonfire of them—all twelve pairs—and then she was going on a sexual rampage through the adult male population of Sydney. He’d see who was highly strung and sexually frustrated then!
CHAPTER TEN
GIANLUCA COULDN’T BELIEVE what he was seeing.
She was half stripped and pouring water over herself from a jug. Pouring it over bare, gleaming skin. The clear water, shot with gold at this angle, was gushing out of the pump and Ava had bent over to plunge her arms underneath it, splashing water down her back. She stood up and shook herself completely unselfconsciously.
She jiggled. Everything jiggled.
He found himself scanning the area for perverts even as he advanced on her, not entirely sure what his purpose was at this point.
He’d come back for her with the bike, only to spend the last half hour tracking her down. Naturally she’d come back into the garden and wound up at the foundry, but instead of finding a contrite woman he discovered a wood nymph.
She must have heard his tread, but she ignored him and ran more water over the back of her neck, then cupped her hands and brought some into her mouth.
It was too much. He reached down and cut off the flow with an aggressive snap.
‘Hey!’ she coughed.
He shoved her shirt at her. ‘Cover yourself up.’
She turned around and his gaze instantly dropped to her breasts, to the gleaming, glistening rivulets of water running down those slopes in a race to see which was going to soak the white cotton bra first.
He recognised that she was saying something but it got lost in the roar of testosterone currently running at full throttle through him—the kind of overload that made a man say, do, be anything required to stay perfectly still, beholding something designed to turn him into a blithering idiot.
His gaze dropped a little further to the revelation of how her ribs narrowed to a beautifully indented waist, and below her hips flared out almost outrageously. The ugly trousers had lost their top button and hung from the widest point of her hips, revealing her navel and a masterpiece of a soft female belly. Like most men, he really wasn’t enamoured of a flat female stomach, and his fingers flexed as he resisted the temptation to touch her there, to stroke her, to test the softness, before his hand moved lower...
He distinctly heard her say, ‘Get a grip, Benedetti.’
His attention bounced back to her breasts. The bra was definitely opaque now. Strawberry pink nipples were visible.
Astounded by his lack of self-control, he snarled at her, ‘Put the shirt on—Dio!’
When she just stood there, blinking like a rabbit in a gun’s sights, he took hold of one of her hands and began pushing it through an armhole.
She jerked away from him and hurriedly pulled the shirt over her shoulders, turning her back on him.
He took a couple of steps back, struck by the way he was behaving. Like a madman.
So what if she was standing around in her underwear? He’d had girlfriends in the past who didn’t seem to possess a bikini top, who paraded around poolside, and frankly he couldn’t have cared less.
Why had he complicated something so utterly simple with this farce? He should never have brought her here. He should have withstood his desire to have her to himself and kept to his plan to take her to Ragusa. Instead he now had her halfway up a mountain with very limited options for getting her down. He should be focussing on those logistics, not on this overwhelming need to corral her. He would explain to her about traditional attitudes and the need to respect them. She would keep herself buttoned up. She would behave, in truth, like the twenty-year-old Sicilian virgin his mother would prefer him to marry. Only then could he relax.
He watched Ava fighting her way into her shirt, muttering something about him being a prude, all the while trying to cover herself up. Her head was bent and he could see the soft kiss curls made by her hair at the base of her neck, at odds with her unforgiving clothes.
Tenderness unexpectedly backhanded him.
* * *
When Ava had heard him coming her heart leapt because he’d actually come looking for her. But her first instinct—to be modest, to cover herself up—she had thrown aside.
After all, stab-your-heart-out-blondes didn’t have a problem with advertising their wares.
Oh, she’d known she was playing with fire, but deep down an entirely feminine part of her psyche had wanted a little payback.
Sexually frustrated, was she? Well, two could play at that game.
But he’d looked at her as if he was made of stone.
She’d tho
ught her breasts looked pretty good in this bra. Not perky—you couldn’t be her size and shoot for the moon...although given this man had had close personal contact with some spectacularly beautiful women he was probably used to the stay-up-on-their-own-thanks-to-a-surgeon variety.
Ava shut down on that line of thought. It didn’t help.
‘The people here are conservative,’ he imparted roughly. ‘This isn’t your Bondi Beach, with its topless women, and nor is it Positano. This is part of a small mountain village. Show some respect.’
Still feeling beleaguered by all those gorgeous women with more noteworthy breasts he had access to—no doubt he didn’t yell at them and do his best to cover them up—Ava lost her temper.
‘Respect?’ she muttered, fumbling with the buttons. ‘Why don’t you start showing me some respect? This whole mess is all your fault to begin with. You’re the one who wanted to take the scenic tour of Italy...’
She turned around, only to find he was standing right behind her. She looked up and blinked. He had an odd, entirely too satisfied look on his face.
She gave a soft gasp as he picked her up and tossed her potato-sack fashion over his shoulder.
‘Put me down!’ she shrieked. But apparently one hundred and fifty pounds of wriggling woman didn’t deter a man who had been pushed to his limit, and Ava was getting the distinct impression this might be the case.
As he waded through the undergrowth she stopped struggling and sagged a little against him. Gianluca only put her down when they reached the road.
She spotted the red Ducati immediately.
‘What’s this?’
‘Transport down the mountain.’
As he spoke he straddled the bike.
Ava’s feet had frozen. She was not strapping herself to his back on that thing.
‘Sorry, Benedetti. Been there, done that...’
‘Get on the bike, Ava.’
Something about the tone of his voice, the fact he was not quite looking at her, and the way she was feeling—tired, confused, and a little overwhelmed at seeing the bike—had her doing as he asked.
He fired up the four-stroke engine. It purred and crackled with energy. She approached and slid carefully onto the seat. There wasn’t much room. Her pelvis was smack up against his hard rear, her inner thighs pressing against his lean, muscled hips. She held herself as stiffly as she could, but he was big and warm and solid, and as they took off her hands groped instinctively for his waist. She tightened them over slabs of hard muscle and heat and swore she felt them move.
Her thighs melted as if on cue. This was not good.
The bike leapt as they hit the road. He took the corners on the narrow ribbon of mountain road at speed. Without helmets there was some risk involved. But something else was riding him. She could feel the tension in his big body. Which was just fine by her, because none of this was her idea of fun either. Except for the part about her entire body buzzing and tingling like an electrical storm. But she put that down to proximity and friction.
‘Next time remind me to take a bus,’ she commented as he braked and they pulled over to allow a small car to pass on the single road ribboning down the mountain.
‘Si? You would last five minutes, cara. The minute you opened that fine mouth of yours the driver would dump you on the roadside.’
She relaxed slightly. This was good. This she could do.
‘Careful, Benedetti, or I’ll jump off—and how are you going to explain that to your mother and Alessia?’
‘Believe me, bella, once they meet you nobody will question me for dumping you.’
He gunned the engine and they took off again.
Ava guessed she deserved that one. If she was going to dish them out, she had to take them. But she knew well enough that neither woman liked her particularly, and the reminder recalled her to the reality of her situation. She’d almost forgotten in the excitement what this was all about, and her heart started to thump to an irregular, painful beat she recognised.
‘Hold on,’ he instructed, and he angled them off the road where they hit an unsealed track. Within minutes it became increasingly rocky.
Bouncing behind him, she shouted, ‘This wasn’t your best idea!’
‘It’s a damn sight safer than the road,’ he responded grimly, ‘and the benefit is, you get to live.’
‘With bruises on my posterior!’
‘Keep looking at the upside, cara.’
They hit a rut and her bottom came down hard on the seat. She moaned.
‘You did that on purpose!’
‘Sometimes fate takes a hand.’
This wasn’t fun any more. She was tired of all the fighting, mostly engineered by herself, to keep him at arm’s length. But he seemed to be taking some enjoyment in shaking her up. She fell quiet, concentrating on not coming down too hard on the seat.
To her surprise he was braking gently, gradually bringing the bike to a halt. His movements were careful, deliberate. The brake, the ignition, the footrest. The dreadful sudden silence.
Ava looked around at the craggy rocks rising up above them and for some reason she panicked.
‘What now?’ she asked nervously. ‘You get off, push the bike into the ravine and I’m never heard of again?’
He shifted around and she jerked back, unable to unhook her legs. She was stuck. On a bike, in the back of beyond, with a man who seemed to be all brawn and muscle. And she’d been poking him with a big sharp stick. All day.
His golden eyes moved over her with unsettling directness, and under his scrutiny she could feel her cheeks starting to burn.
‘We need to get this out of our systems,’ he asserted roughly.
Ava could have put her hand over her heart in that moment and sworn it was the last thing she’d expected him to say.
‘S-sorry?’
‘What is the Australian saying? We need to screw like rabbits until the novelty’s worn off.’
Ava gaped. ‘We what?’
‘Is the vernacular wrong?’
She was about to tell him exactly how wrong he was, even as her pulse sped up, when she caught the glint in his golden eyes from beneath those sinfully thick black lashes and everything painful and wrong about her life tumbled away.
He wasn’t laughing at her, she realised. He was including her in the joke. And with that a very important piece of that long-ago jigsaw moved into place. She remembered—this was how he’d made her feel. As if she wasn’t on the outside looking in any more. As if it were all about him and her, their own exclusive little club.
‘Yes, the vernacular is wrong,’ she said a little faintly.
He smiled at her and she felt her heart lift, as if it were attached to strings connected to his wide, sensual mouth.
Her own mouth twitched. She was not going to laugh.
‘And I can assure you that won’t be happening,’ she followed up quickly. But as much as she tried to sound prim and decisive it all collapsed as everything tense and painful inside her unravelled.
He reached over and did something so unexpected she stopped breathing. He cradled her cheek with his hand, forcing her to look at him, following the curve of her cheekbone gently with the pad of his thumb.
‘So we are agreed?’
She wanted to push his hand away, bristle like a cat under a pail of water, but this sudden gentleness on his part brought her ridiculously ready emotions to the surface. She blinked rapidly.
‘You remind me of those little porcupines, rolling into a ball of bristles to protect yourself, but underneath you have this soft, velvety little belly.’
‘Porcupines are rodents,’ she retorted, wondering if that reference to her belly was because, unlike the women he dated, she had one. ‘Trust you to compare me to a pest.’
Then she realised she’d just scrambled to protect herself—exactly as he’d said.
‘What is it you’re running from? What is it that threatens you, Ava?’ His voice was quiet and he continued to stroke her
.
Her heart was fluttering wildly. She could feel herself wanting to lean against him, of all things wanting to confide in him, tell him how confused she was feeling, being back here in Italy with him, wondering if she had made a terrible mistake seven years ago and not wanting to make a worse one now.
She looked into his eyes and he smiled. ‘You find me attractive, si? It is nothing to be ashamed of.’
Saved by his ego! She knocked his hand away. Just as all sorts of longings had risen to the surface they were swamped by his incredible arrogance. ‘Oh, yes, all women must find you utterly irresistible. It just must gall you to know I’m immune.’
‘Immune?’ His fingers, so gentle on her cheek, drummed lightly on the frame of the bike. ‘How much easier this would be if you were. I wouldn’t have to put up with your constant attention-seeking.’
‘Attention-what? I’m doing nothing of the sort.’ She looked away, because if she was honest it was a whopper of a lie. She had been enjoying having his whole attention all day. ‘It’s just your colossal ego,’ she muttered.
‘I seem to remember you admired my ego seven years ago, cara.’
Ava swung around. ‘I don’t want to talk about that!’
‘Yes, you do,’ he growled. ‘It’s all you want to talk about.’
Caught off guard by the truth, she lashed out. ‘I was stupid. You took advantage of me!’
‘You were the older woman,’ he inserted with that incredible cool.
Ava shot him an incredulous look. ‘I can’t believe you’re throwing my age at me!’
He made an impatient gesture of disbelief with one hand and with another movement slid his hand into the backpack strapped behind the bike. He uncapped a bottle and thrust it at her.
‘What’s that for?’
‘To cool you down. I don’t have a bucket of water to hand.’
‘I’m not the one talking about rabbits,’ she grumbled, irritated because she was breathless all of a sudden. Even fighting with him turned her on. This was most unlike her! She took a swallow and handed it back to him.
