The Ranieri Bride

by Michelle Reid

  ‘Yourself, maybe?’ He gave her a clue as to where he was going with this. ‘Perhaps you are wondering if that sensational body hidden beneath the grey sack still has the power to turn me on…’

  Did it?

  Freya shocked herself by actually pondering the disgusting suggestion. Would sex with him buy her back her job?

  Something sizzled inside her. It was an even more shocking sensation called…temptation.

  Well, fight it! she snapped at herself. Remember what this is really about: Nicky—not the humiliating price of sex!

  But the atmosphere between them was really beginning to fizz the way it used to. The sudden awareness of him as a full-blooded, very physical and sexual being with the sensual touch of a—

  Freya sucked in a breath, slender throat working as she tried to keep her mind on track. He’s a bastard, she told herself. A true, cold-hearted, ruthless Neanderthal who thinks nothing of sacking me from my job in one sentence, then suggesting we have sex in the next!

  But what could she do? What could she say to put the swine in his place? Her job was her only source of income. She depended on it as others did on water to drink. Without it she was useless as a caring provider for Nicky, totally defenceless against anything else Enrico decided to do to her to make her bend to his will.

  Call his bluff—walk away—her common sense challenged her. You said it down there in the ladies’ room: even Enrico could not be so archaic as to sack you because you refuse to give him what he wants.

  ‘L’alimentazione della donna è nel suo silenzio,’ he murmured softly.

  A woman’s power is in her silence, she translated.

  Not so she’d noticed, Freya thought bitterly. She’d never felt weaker in her life.

  Then he reached out to curve long fingers beneath her chin and lift it. Eyes clashed with eyes. Intimacy, familiarity licked like a flame through her insides and filled her with the knowledge of what he was going to do next.

  ‘No,’ she gasped out in shaken protest.

  But too late. His dark head was already moving closer, his mouth already parting to cover hers. And it did it in that oh, so gentle, persuasive way it had always used to, before they began making love.

  Response sent a tight sting running right through her middle. She tried to fight it. She kept her fingers clenched tightly beneath her arms and refused to kiss him back, even if she could not pull her mouth away.

  But she could taste Enrico, the man she had loved and lost but never forgotten. He kissed her the way Enrico had always kissed her, with a slow and agonisingly sumptuous patience until the pleasure of it filled just about every sensual crevice she possessed. The gentle tip of his tongue found its way into one of those crevices, parting her lips and making her tremble as she fought the need to respond. Long fingers began sliding from her chin to her nape, and the way he tilted her head back that bit more was quite simply Enrico at his slow, seductive best.

  Pull back, Freya told herself. Don’t let him do this.

  But she couldn’t pull back. And the slow slide of his tongue across the inner tissue of her mouth was exquisite. A dizzying dip into what felt like drug-induced pleasure. Then her hair came loose to tumble free as a bird down the tension in her back and he drew her closer. The moment her front made contact with his the fight was over for her. It was as if he’d thrown a switch and turned her on like a light.

  It was wrong, it was bad, but she still couldn’t stop herself from being drawn into the kiss like a fool with no brain who couldn’t pull back from the brink.

  She groaned as she felt her fingers unclenching. Tense and trembling, they unwrapped themselves from around her ribcage and began feeling their way up the smooth cloth of his jacket, then continued on in a tense drift across the thin covering of his white shirt.

  Enrico muttered something in soft, thick Italian, parting his thighs so he could draw her even more into the bowl of his hips—and she let him, felt his muscle-tight promise pushing against her stomach, felt its tempting, tantalising length and hardening strength cause a knock-on effect inside her, dragging at finely layered sexual muscles and sending her hips moving against him in response.

  ‘Feeling the pull, cara?’ he murmured against the soft moist hungry warmth of her mouth.

  The slow lick of his tongue took her answer away. She released a helpless little groan instead. The fine tremors attacking her were all-knowing and wanting and uncontrollable. Reaching between their bodies, he flicked open a couple of shirt buttons, then took her hand and fed it inside. It was like being allowed to briefly touch heaven. She felt the pleasurable prickle of chest hair against her palm and the muscle-bound warmth of his golden skin. Then he was taking her other hand and feeding downwards to where he wanted it and held it there, while his long fingers stroked sensually down the length of her fingers, making wetness pool in the cup of her sex.

  Enrico wondered how far he intended to take this.

  All the way, was the answer he gave himself as he felt his body pumping up to meet the slow, knowing stroke of her fingers beneath the encouraging pressure of his. The thick slurry of desire was already taking him over, the need to be naked and doing this fogging out his common sense. The fine scrape of her nails against his chest was making the muscles beneath his skin quiver, and she could still kiss like a shy and tremulously eager virgin. She was warm and soft and erotically compliant, sweet-tasting and hungry but tantalisingly unsure of herself.

  It was wonderful—sensationally, gloriously, gorgeously, intimately Enrico, Freya thought helplessly. She’d adored this once, loved it, learned to want more and more of what this man could make her feel. He was beautiful, so sexually expert at making her feel unbelievably special she didn’t even want to stop him when she felt his fingers releasing the buttons on her jacket.

  Her first chance to grab sanity came when he released her mouth so he could look down at what he’d uncovered. Dark eyelashes lay against the framework of his cheekbones as he viewed the lack of clothing beneath the thin jacket, save for a lacy white bra.

  ‘So you could not throw all of me away.’ The soft laugh he released tingled like magic across her newly exposed flesh.

  Blushing like fire and angry because of it, Freya reached out to tug the jacket shut but he was there first, his kiss-moistened mouth tilted by a smile as he reached to trace the shape of the bra’s scalloped edge with a feather-light finger. Her creamy smooth flesh swelled and quivered. His smile deepened as he watched it happen and the next thing she knew his thumb had slipped inside her bra and was gently circling a tingling, tightening nipple, encouraging it to spring out.

  Unable to stifle a soft gasp of pleasure, Freya closed her eyes and whispered helplessly, ‘Oh, please, don’t do this to me.’

  ‘Sex with your first lover is a life-long aphrodisiac, cara mia,’ he murmured huskily. ‘Old and withered, if I walked into a room with you in it, I would still make you feel like this.’

  ‘But I don’t want to!’

  ‘I know,’ he laughed harshly, then licked her small sob away. ‘It is what makes this so exciting.’

  Glancing at his face, she saw that the flush of passion written across it was spoiled by the glint of anger burning in his eyes. He wanted her like crazy—but he was still hating her like crazy.

  And didn’t she hate him the same way?

  Yes, she told herself. Yes! So what are you doing here?

  About to have sex like the cheap tart he believes you to be, she answered her own question.

  One kiss and you’re any man’s.

  Sanity returned with a shuddering thump. ‘Let go of me,’ she breathed in utter skin-crawling horror.

  His hands sprang away from her in a mocking gesture of compliance. The fact that her hands still possessed his chest and the hard ridge of his penis made her shudder some more as she stepped back from him, snaking her fingers away at the same time.

  She felt pale and icy but looked hot and flushed. Her jacket was hanging open and her
breasts were no longer seated in her lacy bra cups. Two tight nipples were pointing defiantly up at her and she had never, ever despised herself as much as she did just then as she pushed her taunting breasts away while he just leant there, arms folded across his front now, watching her without giving a care to the fact that his own arousal was still lying tight along the zip of his trousers.

  ‘I hate you,’ she whispered.

  ‘So you keep saying.’

  ‘I want to kill you!’

  ‘But then that would leave our son without a father,’ he smoothly pointed out.

  Freya stilled, fingers clutching the edges of her jacket, which she had been about to yank shut. Head lowered, eyes frozen by a silence that, this time, she could not bring herself to break with the denial that stung the tip of her kiss-swollen tongue.

  ‘Ah, we make progress,’ Enrico drawled lazily, unable, while she was still frozen, to stop his eyes from following the warm tide of silk red hair flowing around her shoulders and her arms.

  Unutterably exquisite, he observed grimly, even with split ends in need of attention. She always had been the most delicious and exciting package he’d ever had the pleasure of unwrapping, whether from workaday clothes, leisure-wear or sexy, very expensive gowns. Pinned up, tucked in, shapeless or just plain ugly, unwrapping Freya Jenson was a man’s kind of pleasure he had wanted to keep all to himself.

  Then along had come Luca.

  ‘Found your conscience at last, cara?’ he taunted on the back of that final reminder. ‘Thinking about all those poor people out there you will put out of work along with yourself if you don’t learn to curb your lying tongue?’

  She heaved in a breath. ‘Nicky is—’

  ‘Nicolo Alessandro Valentino Jenson,’ he inserted with the silky dark luxury of his Italian accent. ‘You just could not resist naming my son after me…’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  HE WAS right. Freya went hot all over. Enrico got his Christian name from his paternal grandfather, Alessandro from his maternal one. Valentino had been the name of his late father. Nicolo was exclusive to Enrico himself.

  ‘Nicolas,’ she corrected.

  ‘In defiance,’ he nodded. ‘You are a hard woman, Freya Jenson, with a hard heart and a taste for vendetta. But when it came right down to it you could not stop yourself from naming our child for his father.’

  What did she say? Did she give in now? Did she swallow her anger and bitterness and pride and give this man who’d let her down so badly the triumph over her he was waiting for?

  ‘If you want me to say it out loud then I won’t—ever.’ Because even now, with all his threats laid out in front of her, she still could not give him that much.

  ‘Although it is the truth? He is my son?’

  Lips pinned tightly together, she said nothing.

  ‘Rumour has it that Luca is so vain in the bedroom, he can only perform if there is a mirror in which he can see himself,’ Enrico’s hateful voice resonated on. ‘There was no such mirror in our bedroom, cara, so the chances are that he could not have kept it up long enough to have been any good at the seed-sowing stuff. Unless you held a hand mirror over your face while he did it, of course.’

  Freya hit him. She did not know where the impulse had come from, or why it had taken that particular nasty taunt to make her react the way she did, but the next thing she knew her fingers were leaving red score marks on his hard, handsome cheek.

  ‘S-sorry,’ she heard herself stammer. ‘But you—’

  Too late once again. The black eyes flared up with rage and his hands snaked out. Next thing, he’d hauled her back against him. His mouth this time was hard and cruel. In the few seconds it took between her slap, his flare of rage and their kiss, Freya had run the gauntlet of shock, dismay, then fear and arrived at passion, which was unleashed from its restraints and hell-bent on devouring both of them. There was no sensual patience now, but the full onslaught of a grinding mouth-to-mouth possession that made her jaw ache and her lips burn with its heat.

  She wriggled and squirmed and grabbed at his hair to pull his head away but it didn’t stop anything, in fact, it only made things worse. He deepened the kiss and hot need flooded her. Her tugging fingers curled then clung. It was like giving the green light to an orgy of the senses. Anger fed it, aided by the stinging echo of the slap. They’d had fights before which had ended up wallowing in hot, seething passion—but never, ever anything as hot and seething as this.

  It was almost as if her brain had shut off—but it hadn’t. She was aware of everything, knew what she was doing was wrong…stupid! But he felt and sounded and tasted so good! All man-out-of-control and fast, breathtaking hunger. She fed him and urged him on. Her jacket was wrenched from her arms and her shoulders. It landed somewhere in a limp grey heap. Her bra went next and he did not release her mouth even as his own jacket was raked off his back and flung aside.

  A new kind of heat trammelled up inside her, the kind that set her gasping as she wrenched free the rest of his shirt buttons while he pushed up her skirt to close his hands round her thighs. The slide of those knowing fingers from lace-top hold-ups to lacy panties made her gasp and quiver. When he found what he was hunting for, the finger he ran along the groove of stretched fabric between her legs set fine, receptive tissue unfurling in helpless, pulsating arousal, and the way that finger trembled as he hooked the fabric out of his way only made her gasp and quiver again.

  It had been the memory of the warm, slick, knowing stroke of his finger that had awoken her in the middle of the night, aching and throbbing with need, only to find herself alone in her bed. It had been the pleasure-giving feel of that finger sliding inside her that she’d yearned for so badly in those lonely moments, and the only way to relieve the agony had been to curl into a tight ball and sob her heart out.

  Now it was here. It was real and she’d never felt so desperate.

  ‘You’re hot for me,’ he rasped out, though his voice shook as he said it.

  Tugging her mouth free, she opened her eyes and found herself looking into two deep, dark pits of angry derision that were spiked by pure, untamed, passionate want.

  ‘Do I stop?’ he demanded.

  Her reply was a shrill little whimper.

  ‘Do I—?’ he raked at her.

  ‘No!’ she sobbed out.

  Fire lit those dark, deriding eyes with triumph. She heard the scrape of a zip and her sexual temperature went soaring. When he lifted her up to straddle him with her knees pressed into the desk either side of his hips, she arched her lower body into him and clung. The heated clash of skin against skin made her wild and wanting. By now his head was drawn back on his neck, her fingers buried in his hair to hold him there while she helped him maintain their hot-tongued, deep, deep kiss. Then, with a single hard move, he used his hands on her hips to position her above him and draw her down onto the long, hard length of his waiting shaft.

  It was like sheathing himself in satin fire. Enrico had to close his eyes on a shuddering groan as pure pleasure flooded through him in a heated rush. When he opened his eyes again, her pointed breasts taunted his tongue and he shifted his hands to support her back so she could arch further and give him access.

  They’d made love in some outlandish places. They’d fallen on each other like wild animals often enough. But never like this before, in his office, in broad daylight, on a desk, with their clothes half off and their bodies driven by the concentrated power of driving, angry, deep-thrusting lust.

  Deserting her breasts, he went for her mouth again, greedy for everything at once. He despised her, but he had never felt more alive than he was feeling at this moment. The power of it drenched him in the burning heat of sensual excess. She was the one causing the mayhem, her slender hips moving up and down on him and rotating in the way he had taught her in order to enhance their every pleasure.

  She was amazing at it. He lifted his mouth away from hers to look at her. Her eyes were so dark now, the green in them was lost. He h
eld her gaze. It was part of the excitement to have their eyes and bodies locked, as her hands clung to his hair. Her own hair hung like a crackling curtain that cloaked both of them while his long fingers moulded her slender, tight-skinned hips as she rode him, greedily taking every bit of him in her sliding, taut-muscled, sensuous sheath.

  ‘Coming, amore?’ he husked as he felt her first telling ripples take hold of him. ‘Want to fly with your lover?’

  ‘Yes,’ she gasped.

  He stabbed. She cried out. He picked her up by her clinging hips and backed her up against the nearest wall and took control with a hard, angry thrust that drove her so mindless she cried out his name as she came in a gasping, clenching, pulsing flood all around him.

  His name, he thought angrily. His! And then he followed this flowing-haired witch into the drumming, hot space of sensual heaven.