‘Getting hotter by the minute,’ she said with a deliberate arch of her spine to showcase her breasts, swollen with hormones.
His eyes went straight to them, his nostrils flaring like a proud stallion. ‘You become more beautiful every day,’ he said, sinking into the water and spreading his legs so she was encased between them.
Maya sat up to run her hands teasingly down his hair-roughened thighs, feeling him tense in response. She held his dark gaze, mesmerising him with the sultry promise of her eyes, knowing he would be throbbing with want within seconds of her reaching for him under the water. She tiptoed her fingers up and down his legs, stopping just short of his erection. ‘You like that?’ she asked.
‘You know exactly what I like,’ he said, lying back as she came forward.
Her breasts brushed along his chest, her nipples tingling with pleasure at the friction of his hair. Belly to belly, it was the most erotic sensation, feeling his desire for her burgeoning against her, seeking entry, aching for release, twitching with the need to do so as quickly as possible.
But she wasn’t going to let him until she had teased him some more. She wanted him begging and she would not stop until he did so. So far, he had dictated all the terms in their relationship. Now it was her turn, using her feminine power to remind him that they were equals, at least when it came to physical desire. Sex was another way to connect, a deeply intimate way to show how compatible they were when other things were not taking centre stage.
She pushed a finger to the middle of his sternum, making him go down further into the water. ‘Down, boy,’ she said in a sexy tone. ‘I’m not quite finished with you yet.’
‘I thought you were tired,’ he said in a kind of strangled voice.
She stabbed playfully at his chest again and fluttered her eyelashes at him. ‘You said that, not me. I am not in the least bit tired. In fact, I am just warming up.’
‘Dio’, he groaned as she bent her head to his chest and licked each of his nipples in turn.
Maya kept going, lower and lower, slowly, tantalisingly so, stringing out the anticipation, making him quiver with each sweep and glide of her tongue and gentle playful nip of her teeth. The water was too deep for her to do what she really wanted so she deftly pulled the plug, smiling as the sound of the water gurgling away filled the pulsing silence.
Giorgio’s dark brows lifted. ‘Bath’s over?’
She was on all fours and coming dangerously closer. ‘Definitely all over.’
‘So…’ he snatched in a breath ‘…what happens next?’
She gave him a come-hither look as she stood amongst the retreating bubbles, her hands sliding down over her breasts and belly and to the naked heart of her sex. ‘I think you know what comes next.’
He did and he could barely wait.
He had never seen her in quite this mood before. She was like a sultry temptress, luring him into a sex game that was unlike anything he had experienced with her before. He was ready to come, just looking at her touching herself like that.
He got to his feet and followed her to the bedroom, not even caring about the wet slap of his footsteps on the marble floor and the bubbles that trailed in their wake.
He wanted her and he wanted her now.
Urgently, passionately and endlessly.
She turned at the bed and tilted one hip in a pose that said come-and-get-me. ‘What are you waiting for?’ she asked.
Giorgio came down on top of her, thrusting into her moist core, making every hair on the back of her neck quiver in response. Her tight warm body clutched at him, drawing him into her, making it impossible for him to slow things down. He was rushing headlong into a climactic release, only just managing to control himself long enough to make sure her needs were met first. He played her with his fingers, the swollen heart of her so ready for him she gasped and cried out loud with the pleasure it evoked. Within seconds she was convulsing around him, triggering his own earth-shattering response.
Her fingers worked their way up and down his spine in the aftermath, her soft little caressing movements making his body react to her all over again.
Giorgio propped himself up on his elbows and looked down at her cheeks, which were flushed with pleasure. ‘You know, when the baby gets bigger we won’t be able to make love like this,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to be a little more creative.’
He saw the flicker of worry in her eyes. ‘Sometimes I feel like it’s not happening…that it’s all a dream and someone is going to wake me up and say you’re not pregnant. There is no baby.’
He brushed the damp hair away from her face. ‘I know you are, cara, but look how well you are doing. Everyone is remarking on how wonderful you look. You are positively glowing. It won’t be long now and you will feel the baby moving inside you.’ He placed his hand on her belly. ‘I can’t wait to feel him or her kicking its little feet.’
‘Bronte said it will be another few weeks before I feel the first flutters of movement,’ she said.
‘You will tell me the first time you feel something, won’t you?’ he asked.
‘Of course,’ she said, lowering her gaze as she traced a finger over his collarbone.
In spite of everything, Giorgio was still worried she might leave him. He had left himself wide open for a financially crippling settlement by not organising a prenuptial agreement before they married. But, with his father’s accident and then his rapid decline, there hadn’t been time.
He wasn’t comfortable making threats about taking sole custody, but he wanted this baby and he wasn’t going to allow her to take it to the other side of the world, or in fact even to England, where he couldn’t see it daily and have a positive influence on its life. He was not going to join the band of divorced fathers he knew, men who hardly ever saw their children, men who spent lonely weekends and Christmases and holiday periods while their children were with their mother and her new partner.
He wanted to give this child a stable and happy childhood. His childhood had been perfect until Chiara had died. It had taken him decades to be able to think of that time in his life without flinching. His parents had become shadows of themselves; it had taken years before they came out of the abyss of grief that had consumed them. But they had come out. They had worked at their marriage, even in spite of his father’s couple of affairs, which had seemed more a product of Giancarlo’s grief than any malicious desire to inflict hurt on his already suffering wife. Giorgio’s mother had forgiven him and they had moved on and, up until his death, had enjoyed a close and loving relationship.
But then Giorgio’s mother had always loved his father. She had loved him in spite of her pain over the loss of their daughter; she had loved him in spite of his betrayal with other women, she had loved him right to the end, when he had closed his eyes for the last time, lying in her arms.
Giorgio was not sure what Maya felt for him but he was almost certain it wasn’t love. In the beginning she had been captivated by his wealth and lifestyle and the love she had spoken of back then seemed more a star-struck variety than the real thing. After the first year, she had stopped telling him she loved him, which more or less proved her feelings had not been genuine.
He was ashamed to admit he hadn’t been in love with her when he asked her to marry him. It had been a convenient marriage for him, a way to secure his future. His world had been rocked by his father’s accident and he had done what had been expected of him by marrying a suitable wife to continue the proud heritage he had been born into.
It had only been recently that he had thought long and hard about his feelings for Maya. They had been changing like the seasons: warm and cool, hot and cold. The experiences they had gone through had clouded things for him. He had shied away from the overwhelming emotions Maya demonstrated at times. It was the pattern of a lifetime and it had taken her leaving him for him to see it. But he knew that without the pressure of producing an heir and fulfilling everyone else’s expectations he and Maya were amazingly compatible.
Not just in bed, although that was wonderful and he constantly delighted in her body and how it made him feel, but it was more than that, much more. She had been a wonderful support to him through the agonising process of his grandfather’s illness. She had sat for long hours reading to Salvatore and then, when she was not with him, she was at home at the villa, making sure things were in order when Giorgio got home exhausted from trying to juggle all the things he had to do. She quietly and diligently backed him up, offering comfort when he needed it, but also maintaining her new-found independence, not allowing him to dominate her, as he had done in the past.
Maya’s voice interrupted his reverie. ‘Do you think we should find out the sex of the baby on the next ultrasound?’
‘Do you want to know or be surprised?’ Giorgio asked.
‘Haven’t we had enough surprises?’ she asked with a wry look.
He smiled and, leaning forward, pressed a soft kiss to the middle of her forehead. ‘You continually surprise me, Maya,’ he said and moved his lips down the side of her face until he got to her lips.
She moistened them in preparation, her eyes flaring with reawakened need. He lowered his head slowly, inch by inch, taking his time, waiting for that betraying little murmur of pleasure she gave when his mouth finally settled on hers.
No one could kiss like Giorgio, Maya thought. Not that she’d had a truckload of experience, but enough to know that when he kissed her there was no way it could ever be described as chaste and platonic. He kissed with sultry, steamy purpose, his need erotically apparent with every thrust and glide of his tongue inside her mouth.
When he moved his mouth to rediscover her breasts her back lifted off the bed in delight. She felt her nipples tighten to twin points of pleasure as his hot moist mouth enveloped each of them in turn. His hands cupped her feminine mound, teasing her with the so-close-but-not-close-enough presence of his clever, artful fingers.
She whimpered but he kept her hungry for him, holding her in his power, as she had done just minutes before.
Just when she thought she could stand it no longer, he gently but deftly turned her over onto her stomach, coming between her spread legs from behind in the most erotic position of all. There was a primal, earthy quality to it, a raw urgency that made her blood race like rocket fuel in her veins.
He entered her in one slick possessive thrust, a dominant surge of his body that spoke of his alpha status and her feminine submission to it. It was exciting, it was enthralling, it was everything she had hoped it would be. He had her coming apart in seconds, her whole body quaking with the tremors of release, until she was sweaty and sated, her flesh singing and tingling all over.
He waited until she had finished before he emptied himself, the action of his body pumping from behind with the brush of his hips against her sensitive buttocks making her feel a ripple of reaction all over again. She heard him groan deep in the back of his throat, signalling the supreme monumental scale of his pleasure.
Did he have this level of pleasure with anyone else? she wondered. The thought was unwelcome and intrusive, like a rat suddenly appearing under the table just as important dinner guests were to arrive. She couldn’t make it go away; it nibbled at the edges of her consciousness, making her ill with the thought of how Giorgio could so easily have his cake at home and any number of gateaux on the side.
But how could she know without asking, and how could she ask without revealing how much it mattered to her?
Chapter Thirteen
WHEN Maya woke the following morning she found Giorgio’s side of the bed empty, which wasn’t unusual since he was an early riser, but a sixth sense told her something was amiss.
She pushed back the covers and, slipping on a bathrobe, padded down the stairs. She heard him speaking on the phone from his study, which again was not unusual, even at this early hour, for he had business concerns all over the world in several different time zones. What was unusual was the way he was deliberately keeping his voice down, even though she could tell he was blisteringly angry.
He was speaking in English and it was undoubtedly to a woman.
As Maya listened her heart cramped with each word that was spoken, her fragile hopes of happiness dying an excruciatingly painful death.
‘I told you never to call me on this number,’ Giorgio was saying. ‘Our association, as you call it, is over. I have other priorities now.’
The person on the other end of the line must have said something in return for he paused for a moment before continuing in the same harsh tone, ‘I will deny each and every one of your claims. You have no evidence. Everyone will see it as nothing more than a money-making exercise on your part.’
Maya had heard enough. She slipped away and went into the kitchen, in desperate need of a glass of water to soothe her aching throat.
It was there that she saw the morning paper.
It was emblazoned with the features page headline: Hotel Billionaire Giorgio Sabbatini Caught Out in Tell-all Exclusive by Lingerie Model Mistress.
Maya’s hand shook as she turned the pages to the section where there was a photograph of Giorgio and the lingerie model, called Talesha Barton, captured in a cosy-looking tryst in a nightclub. Talesha was everything Maya was not. She was buxom and tall, dark-haired and exotic-looking with wide almond-shaped eyes and a mouth that was impossibly full and sexy.
The tell-all story was full of saucy details of how the part-time model had met the estranged Giorgio Sabbatini and enjoyed a hot night of passion with him in a secret hideaway. ‘He is an amazing lover,’ the model was quoted as saying. ‘He can go all night without a break. It was the best sex of my life.’
Maya swallowed against a tide of nausea and closed the paper, her whole body shaking with anger and despair and indescribable hurt.
Giorgio came into the room just as she turned from the bench. ‘Maya?’
She threw the paper at him, the pages flying like sheets off a clothes line, landing all over the floor at his feet. ‘You bastard,’ she bit out through clenched teeth. ‘You cheating, two-timing bastard.’
He frowned darkly. ‘Now, wait just one damn minute,’ he said, stepping over the debris of the paper on the floor. ‘You surely don’t think any of this rubbish is true, do you?’
Maya was close to hysteria. She could feel it bubbling up inside her; the pain and hurt and sense of betrayal was so acute it had nowhere to go but burst out of her. She felt so hurt, so crushed by his perfidy. And now it was all out in public, what he had been up to and who he had been up to it with. How would she ever hold her head up again? Would people always be looking at her and murmuring about what a naive fool she was to think he wouldn’t return to his playboy form as soon as her back had been turned? How long was she to put up with this? Would there ever be a time when she would be free of this torture?
‘How could you sleep with that…that…tart?’ she asked.
His expression became stony. ‘You are assuming I did actually sleep with her when you have nothing to base that on, other than what you have read in the paper. She was paid a lot of money for that fairy story and I swear to God that’s all it is.’
‘Oh, please.’ She rolled her eyes in disdain. ‘You were photographed with your arms around each other.’
‘If I recall, so were you with your “date”,’ he returned.
Maya stiffened her shoulders. ‘I told you nothing happened. Someone took a photo that looked far more intimate than it was.’
‘Likewise,’ he said. ‘Although I admit I did go out with her a couple of times and I considered taking it further but I decided against it. I let the press make what they wanted of it at the time. I was angry at you for leaving me so I didn’t really care if you read about it at that point. Now it is different.’
‘Because you want it all, don’t you, Giorgio?’ she said bitterly. ‘You want the obedient, compliant little wife at home nurturing your children while you have your bit on the side, just like your father did.’
His jaw went rock-hard and his lips white-tipped at the corners. ‘Keep my father out of this,’ he said. ‘My mother forgave him a long time ago for his fall from grace. It is their business, not ours. And he is no longer alive to defend himself, in any case.’
‘Your mother was a fool to take him back,’ Maya said. ‘But maybe, like you with me, he didn’t give her a choice. Did he blackmail her back into his life? Or was it the fact that she had three young sons to bring up all on her own that prevented her from leaving?’
Giorgio raked his hand through his hair. ‘You have no idea what it was like for them. They lost their little girl, their much adored only daughter. It broke them. My mother grieved and grieved until she was so heavily sedated by the family doctor she couldn’t function. I had to step in so many times to help look after my younger brothers, to feed them and bathe them and put them to bed when the nanny left without notice over something my mother had said in a moment of despair.’ He stopped briefly to draw breath.
‘My father couldn’t cope. He had a hotel business to run. My grandfather and grandmother did what they could but no one could do anything to take away the pain. I lived with the fear of losing my mother, if not my father as well. I was convinced they didn’t want to live any more. I had to do everything in my power to keep them strong, to keep the family together.’
Maya listened without interrupting. It seemed that each time he spoke about his baby sister he told her a little bit more of that tragic time. His gradual opening up to her helped her to understand more about his emotional distancing, the way he found excessive displays of emotion so off-putting. He’d had to be strong for everyone; he’d had to keep his emotions in check while everyone around him was falling apart.
‘And then finally the cloud started to lift,’ he continued. ‘In an ironic way, I think it was my father’s affairs that snapped my mother out of her depression. She knew she had to carry on, to do what she could to rebuild their relationship, which had been so happy before Chiara died.’
Shock: One-Night Heir Page 12
