by Kim Lawrence
‘This is my home. I think you’ll find it is in my best interests that you don’t fail. Or, for that matter, break your neck while you’re on the payroll.’
‘For goodness’ sake! I’m not going to break my neck.’ Do not cry, do not cry. So he didn’t like you; it wasn’t exactly news. ‘It’s totally safe.’ She glanced towards the scaffold and surreptitiously brushed a tear from her cheek. ‘It fully complies with every safety standard. Men work up there every day.’
‘Men work up there with safety harnesses, and they know what they are doing.’
Sophie’s chin went up. ‘And I don’t…?’
His eyes narrowed on her flushed face. ‘You’re only trying to start an argument because you know you’re in the wrong and you can’t admit it.’
There was just enough truth in this claim to make Sophie very angry. She dodged his interrogative glare and shrugged. ‘I was only up there for five minutes. And don’t worry, I’ll sign a waver if you’re concerned about me suing you.’
He muttered something under his breath and took a step forward. The action had none of the lazy grace she associated with him; the tension rolled off him in waves.
Sophie swallowed. She had seen Marco look angry before—he wasn’t the most patient man on the planet and she seemed to have a knack of irritating him—but this was the first time she had seen that anger raw and naked without the veneer of urbanity.
Her eyes riveted on his lean face, she nibbled nervously on her full lower lip.
This, she thought, must be how a small fluffy animal feels caught in the headlights of an oncoming juggernaut, except even the dimmest fluffy animal wouldn’t be crazy enough to admire the vehicle’s paintwork!
She was stupid, but my God, he really was awesome!
He looked down at her, his eyes a green glitter through the dense mesh of his sooty lashes.
In an attempt to forestall the explosion, Sophie squeaked quickly, ‘Just because you have had a bad day, don’t take it out on me.’
‘It just so happens I have had a very good day.’
Sophie took the silent addition until now as read.
He inhaled and shook his head before taking another step towards her.
Sophie, who got a neat blast of the unidentifiable tension emanating from him, took a step backwards, but he carried on advancing and then her feet were not moving backwards but forwards to meet him, until they stood toe to toe.
Now how did that happen? She pressed her hand to her chest as she struggled to catch her breath… Could a person forget how to breathe?
As his hands fell heavy on her shoulders Sophie’s head automatically fell backwards, to meet his gaze. Their eyes locked and she swayed towards him, the tug that drew her so strong, so impossible to resist, that she would not have been surprised to see a cord from her chest connected to his, reeling her in.
No, that’s your lust.
Ignoring the contribution of the sly voice of her subconscious she tried to break the hypnotic hold of his glittering green eyes, and failed. Did she even want to succeed?
The debate in her head was unresolved. Part of her appeared pre-programmed to lean into his hardness, and it was impossible to think at all when you were being bombarded with so much information—the heat from his body, the warm musky male smell.
The constant nagging ache she had been conscious of over the past weeks became centralised as a tightness in her chest; her breasts felt heavy and tingling.
My God, he is so beautiful, she thought, helplessly dazzled as always by the stark, pure perfection of his dark features. He was lean and hard, all bone, sinew and muscle, the essence of masculinity, and, this close, close enough to feel the warmth—no, heat—radiating from his skin, utterly devastatingly addictive.
Sophie’s heart rate quickened to a rapid thud that vibrated through her body; things shifted and moved inside her as she struggled to break the invisible chains that held her motionless.
‘I…’ Something in his glittering emerald stare made her voice dry.
Marco’s eyes travelled slowly up the graceful pale curve of her throat. He swallowed, the muscles in his brown throat visibly working as his passion-glazed stare stilled on her lips, the hunger roaring in his blood like a fever, his laboured breath loud in the electrically charged air that separated them.
The coruscating heat in his blood, pumping to every cell in his body, disintegrated the intellectual debate he had used to distance himself from the way Sophie Balfour had burrowed into his head, his thoughts, his mind, and now she had taken control of his body also.
She had awoken feelings that he had fought and was still fighting, because she was not the sort of woman he became involved with, though some might dispute appropriateness of the term involved when applied to his relationships with women.
Involvement was what he assiduously avoided. He did not do live-in lovers; he applied the same simple rules to his personal life as he did to business, and it worked.
He had allowed himself to become emotionally entangled once; he had let his heart rule his head…he had allowed it. He hadn’t fallen into the situation; he had walked into it with his eyes open.
He had deliberately ignored the warning signs. In his book that did not make him a victim but a fool—he had wanted to be in love.
He had wanted to create the family he had never had.
And even though Allegra was out of his life, he was still living with the fallout from that decision, the self-contempt and shame.
Allegra had used him to further her ambitions and she had dragged his name through the mud in order to achieve her ends: humiliating him.
He had learnt his lesson; he would never put that sort of power in the hands of a woman again. Emotions were dangerous and unreliable, but God, her mouth was sweet and so were the crazy, unpredictable things she said.
Sophie Balfour refused to be neatly categorized, and no matter what heading he filed her under she continued to be a distraction.
He looked at her mouth, her lips raspberry red, and thought, No, not distraction…obsession, and one quite clearly it was illogical to fight.
A man always craved what he was forbidden and the forbidden fruit soon lost its appeal.
‘Dio mio!’ he rasped rawly. ‘I want you.’
She stopped breathing.
The air hummed with an electric expectation; the tension that hung between them was as taut as the corded muscles that stood out in his neck.
He cupped her face between his hands, sliding his fingers into her hair to frame her face. The contact feathered along her nerve endings, making her entire body thrum with desire. Her knees sagged and she caught hold of his shirt.
‘This is…not happening.’
His hand slid down her back, pulling her towards him and she didn’t try and stop him. Why aren’t I doing anything? Why aren’t I telling him this is not an appropriate action for an employer?
She should never have got on first-name terms with him; it had all gone downhill from there. ‘Mr Speranza,’ she croaked.
He gave an incredulous gasp and lowered his head close enough for her to feel the warmth of his breath, sweet and fragrant on her skin. When he spoke, she reacted as violently to his voice, a throaty whisper, as if it was a caress.
‘Miss Balfour,’ he said, managing to inject mockery and caressing warmth into her name. ‘You asked me why I came…’
Sophie, her breath coming in gusty little gasps, shook her head and said, ‘You came to check up on me.’
‘No, Sophie, this is why I came….’ Marco made the admission as much for his own benefit as hers.
Her eyes widened with shock, then closed as her lips parted under the firm pressure of his mouth. A sigh shuddered through her body and she went as limp as a rag doll in his arms.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
‘YOU kissed me,’ Sophie said, not opening her eyes.
She felt the vibration of laughter in his chest, but when she forced her eyelids to lift there was
no corresponding smile on his lips. His lean features were taut, the golden skin stretched tight across the strong planes of his angular face. His eyes glittered like hard emeralds as he stared at her with a driven, hungry intensity that sent a fresh tingle along her nerve endings.
‘And I intend to again, bellezza mia.’ He ran his thumb slowly up her throat, following the motion with his eyes until it reached the corner of her mouth, then he looked into her eyes. ‘Do you have a problem with that?’
The throaty challenge drew a whimper from Sophie’s aching throat. ‘I…’ Her eyes locked to his, she shook her head, totally convinced that if he didn’t kiss her again she would suffer permanent physical and psychological damage. It might be too late to do anything about the psychological damage because she had clearly already lost her mind.
‘No problem,’ she whispered, thinking, Unless you count the fact I might fall in a heap at your feet at any moment.
This time there was a smile, a white wolfish smile that screamed danger.
A sensible person would, she knew, have run away from a smile like that. She clung and lifted her head, welcoming the silky invasion of his probing tongue. Hunger licked along her nerve endings, drawing a lost cry from her throat as she wound her arms around his neck and kissed him back. The hunger that had been inside her exploded like a star burst.
It was several breathless moments after his mouth lifted that she opened her eyes and admitted, ‘I wondered what that would be like.’
‘Now you know.’
She did and life was never quite going to be the same. She had never gone in for a lot of sexual experimentation, partly because no man had ever touched her and made her forget her name, and partly because most men she knew only wanted her sisters, and she didn’t want to be the runner-up prize.
‘And?’ Marco prompted, running a finger across the swollen outline of her trembling mouth and looking into her half-closed eyes. Her lashes brushed her softly rounded cheeks, casting shadows across the flushed curves. He traced the feathery outline of one shadow with his fingertip before kissing her hard on the mouth.
Her eyelids squeezed closed as a moan was dragged from Sophie’s chest. She sighed deeply, her fingers clenching the fabric of his shirt as he nipped softly at the pink cushiony fullness of her full lower lip.
‘Do I pass, cara?’
‘Oh, yes,’ she sighed into his mouth as she gripped his hair-roughened forearms.
The kiss this time had less to do with control and more to do with hunger and desperation.
His hand tangled in her hair as he tilted her head backwards to look into her face. ‘You want me.’ It was not a question and it did not even cross Sophie’s mind to deny it.
Little broken gasps left her lips as he ran his tongue along the tremulous curve of her upper lip.
‘I want you,’ she agreed.
Want but had never expected to have, like being six inches taller or having men look at her face when they spoke to her rather than her breasts.
Along with the lust that slammed through him at the admission came a less-welcome emotion—guilt. The way she looked at him, the trust, the total lack of artifice, touched a dormant sense of chivalry in him.
‘You need to know something.’
The urgency pumping through his body made him blunt. ‘I don’t do love and commitment.’ The one time he had given his heart to a woman she had ripped it out and ground it up.
He was trying to tell her it was a one-night stand and not to have any expectations.
Did he think she didn’t already know that?
‘What makes you think I do?’ she challenged. ‘I have a career and…plans…’ This wasn’t one of them, but now wasn’t the time to think about that. ‘The last thing I want is a relationship,’ she promised him.
The assertion should have made him feel more comfortable, but instead Marco was conscious of a vague feeling of dissatisfaction.
‘Recreational sex is all I have time for.’
He pushed a strand of silky hair from her cheek. ‘Can you spare a few minutes for me in your busy five-year plan?’
‘I think so,’ she whispered, shivering at the feathery-light kiss he pressed to her parted lips.
‘And if I need more?’
She looped her arms around his neck and pressed her body to his, gasping as she felt the rock-hard impression of his erection grind into the soft flesh of her stomach.
‘You can have as much as you want. You can have anything you want.’
Lust kicked in his belly as he groaned and picked her up.
He stumbled his way out of the ballroom, up the stairs and into her bedroom, his progress impeded not just by the objects he bumped into but by the kisses she rained on his neck. His shirt was half off before he laid her on the bed; the other half took him about two seconds.
Breathing hard he leaned over her; her face was a pale blur in the dark. ‘I wanted to do this with the lights on.’ He had, in the privacy of his fantasies. ‘But no matter, this is still better.’
‘Better than what?’
Marco smiled and, supporting her weight with one arm, he whipped her nightshirt over her head.
‘Better than anything,’ he said, cupping one soft quivering mound in his hand and watching it spill through his fingers. He touched his tongue to the pink tip and felt her go limp in his arms. ‘You’re perfect, utterly and totally perfect.’
Sophie gave a sigh of voluptuous pleasure. ‘God, yes,’ she groaned as he laid her back down.
She felt his hands on the belt of her jeans and lifted her hips.
‘This is really happening.’
‘If this is a dream, cara, I don’t want to wake up,’ he confided, sliding the denims over her hips. The pyjama shorts joined them in a heap on the floor three second later.
She opened her eyes and held out her arms, a silent invitation…longing to feel the touch of his flesh against her own.
He didn’t accept the invitation. He just sat there.
Fear curled in her stomach, closing her throat. ‘What’s wrong?’
With a groan like a man in pain Marco shook his head and rasped, ‘I can’t do this!’
Her stomach still ached from the imprint of his erection; it had felt very much to her as if he could.
The rejection was so abrupt and so unexpected that for a moment all Sophie did was blink. She sat up, dragged the top cover with her, self-conscious for the first time about her nakedness. She reached out and touched his cheek, her fingertips skating lightly across the surface.
He opened his eyes but didn’t look at her.
He couldn’t take the risk. He was a man who had always prided himself on control, but it was shredded and liable to disintegrate totally at the slightest provocation. Sophie was a walking, breathing temptation.
Lust still pumped in a hot steady stream through his body. The sight of her mouth, her eyes and her body might just be too much. Still holding her gaze, he took her fingers and, removing them from his skin, shook his head.
‘Give me a minute.’ It would be more than a minute before his painful arousal would allow him to walk straight, let alone think.
Sophie, feeling physically sick, sat there shivering as tears began to slide silently down her cheeks. He saw the glisten and groaned.
‘Sophie!’
Sophie flinched and pulled away from the hand he laid on her shoulder. ‘It’s fine…I’m fine…I understand.’ Actually, she didn’t understand. Why was he being this cruel?
Marco swore under his breath. ‘If you are fine, you are the only one.’
‘Look, I understand. You don’t have sex with the help—at least, apparently not when they look like me. Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone… We can pretend this never happened.’
‘Enough!’ Ignoring her rigidity and protest he pulled her down beside him and drew her stiff body into the shelter of his arms. ‘Dio, you are shaking,’ he said, running a hand down her spine.
‘So are you,’ she
discovered, sniffing. It made her feel slightly better, but not a lot. Her entire body ached with frustration.
‘You are right, I do not have sex with the help. But I do…I want to with you. I will with you, but you…’
He was trying to think of a nice way of saying he didn’t really fancy her. ‘Don’t worry, it was just…I won’t take it personally…’
She heard him swear.
‘You will not take it personally? Then why are you crying?’
‘You forgot who I was and then you…’
‘Just shut up. You are speaking rubbish.’ His accent suddenly sounded very strong.
‘Rubbish?’
‘The disparaging comments, the pull yourself to pieces before someone else does.’
His mesmeric emerald gaze burned into her as he said softly. ‘It has to stop. I do not like it.’
‘All right.’ At that moment she would have agreed to anything he asked just for the painful pleasure of being close to all that hard male heat…just to smell his skin, feel his touch. She ached for him in a way that she had never imagined possible. The hunger lay tight like a fist low in her belly and every individual cell in her body ached.
‘I cannot have sex…’
A low sound of distress escaped her lips and he kissed her hard.
‘Not because I don’t want to. I swear I have never wanted anything more—you are driving me crazy.’
‘Then why?’
A finger to her lips hushed her protest. ‘Because I have nothing to protect you.’ His brow creased into a scowl of self-condemnation as he considered his criminal stupidity.
She shook her head and looked at him through a blur of emotional tears. ‘What do you mean?’
A muscle clenched beside his mouth; the frustration in his eyes made them shine like the gemstones they were so often likened to. ‘I mean, you are not protected, are you?’ The look of total incomprehension in her swimming cobalt-blue eyes wrenched a groan from his throat.
His apparent pain confused Sophie even more.
