by Alison Kent
All I have to do is convince her of that, Rafael thought, and he continued up the stairs feeling every nerve-end he possessed cringe, as they always did when he walked these stairs.
When he stepped into her room she was standing by the window, watching the red taillights of her grandfather’s car make their way down the hill towards Syracuse.
But she was still wearing his shirt.
‘They will come back,’ she said, without turning.
‘I know.’ Crossing the room to stand behind her, he slid his hands around her waist and gently drew her back against him. ‘How much did you overhear?’ he asked.
‘Most of it,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to hurt them,’ she added, and he smiled, because it was good to know that she realised he could do so if he wanted to.
‘I like your grandfather,’ he admitted. ‘He might be a reckless rogue with my money, and he uses his connections with me to his own advantage, but he loves his family. When the chips were down he came here willing to sacrifice my money for your honour.’
‘He believes what Marisia has said.’
‘The point is, Nina—do you believe her?’
Her reply was to turn and snake her arms around his neck. ‘I just want all of this to go away—now.’
It was not the answer he had wanted, and it showed in the way he frowned. ‘I’m going to give you two choices,’ he said. ‘You can get dressed and I will have Gino drive you back to your grandfather’s house. Or you can get dressed and come with me, and we will retreat to a safer place until the fuss has—’
‘I go where you go!’ Her arms tightened their hold on him.
She sounded like the butler, he thought. But that was all it was—a brief thought—because his attention was shifting to other, more seductive things. She had the warm, supple feel of a recently loved woman, and the bloom of that loving still lay soft on her lips and in the darkened blue of her eyes.
His senses stirred, and Nina saw it happen. The frown softened out of his hard features and his eyes took on that dark, sensual look as he studied her mouth. Her lips parted and her fingernails curled into his nape. She moved that bit closer, drawn by the heat of his body and the promise of what it could make her feel.
‘We leave for London in an hour,’ he murmured.
‘OK,’ she agreed.
His fingers moved on her waist, crushing fine cotton as he pressed her close. ‘That means we don’t have time for this.’
‘OK,’ she said again, not really believing him. He would make time. That was what Rafael did; he turned the world on its head to suit his requirements. ‘I’ll go and get dressed, then…’
Like hell you will, those black eyes said, and his mouth took her mouth by storm.
CHAPTER NINE
TWO hours later they were boarding a helicopter. It was midnight, and the clear night sky was alive with stars. As the helicopter lifted into the air Nina glanced back at the house, all shrouded in darkness now.
‘Will you miss it?’ Rafael asked quietly.
‘The house? No,’ she replied without hesitation, and turned away from it.
An hour after that they were seated on a chartered private jet.
Nina slept for most of the flight to London, curled up on a banquette with her head resting in Rafael’s lap and her face pressed up against his waist while he worked on a laptop computer placed on the seat beside him. He was frowning in concentration, but was still aware of the way a set of her slender fingers had crept around his back and eased his shirt out of his trousers so she could have contact with his skin.
They were still making love. It had been like this for them from the first time he had dared to approach her with intimacy, days after they’d married. They’d been lying on a Caribbean beach, supposedly soaking up the sun, but the sensual vibrations flowing between them had reached such a pitch by then that it was either make a move or go back to their villa and take yet another long cold shower.
He had made the move, rolling onto his side, then over her. ‘I want you,’ he’d murmured, and kissed her before she’d had a chance to protest.
She hadn’t protested, he recalled, giving up on trying to work and closing his eyes instead. They’d kissed themselves into a steamy stupor, then he’d gathered up enough sense to move location. He’d carried her back to the villa and she’d clung to him, blue eyes big and dark and driving him crazy—because they’d told him how much she wanted him.
A sigh threaded from him. Her cheek moved on his lap. It took some teeth-gritting control to stop his body from responding beneath that resting cheek.
They’d made love for the first time in the heat of the afternoon, and he’d never been so enchanted or so aware of his own prowess. She’d given him all of herself and he’d given the same back. He had never been the same man since. His cool English bride with her cool English reserve was not cool or reserved when it came to making love with him. And after the loving came this—the need to maintain contact with his skin, no matter where they were or how large the crowd they were in. She made him feel like the only man alive worthy of what she was giving him.
It had become like a drug. The more she’d made him feel the more he’d wanted her close—this close—all the time. When it had all exploded in his face it had been like having a vital part of him ripped out.
He’d become jealous and possessive, and moody with it. If he’d seen her look at another man and it had set his teeth on edge. She had worked for Daniel Fraser. They’d been an item before she’d arrived in Sicily to visit her grandfather. He’d heard about her—had known of her existence because Alessandro and Marisia talked about Louisa’s half-English daughter who owned the big house on the hill.
Seeing her for the first time had been like being hit by a runaway truck. He had never expected to come up against love in any of its forms, never mind the kind that pinned him to the spot. He could not even say it was her fair-skinned beauty that had done it. He’d always preferred dark-haired women, who wore their desires on their warm golden faces, not blonde-haired blue-eyed creatures who wore their reserve like a wall of glass.
‘What are you thinking about?’ a sleepy voice murmured.
‘You,’ he replied.
‘Thought so,’ she said, and rubbed her cheek against his hardening shaft, before levering herself upward until her face came level with his. ‘You have a one-track mind.’
‘Mmm,’ he agreed, waiting for the hand she had just removed from his back to find some other place to latch on. It found his nape, then clearly was not satisfied with that, and slid beneath the neck of his black tee shirt to curl into the tight satin muscle between his shoulder and neck.
Then she kissed him. It was a slow and sensual invitation, made all the more potent because they were hidden from view of everyone else by the bulkhead.
Did he want to make love here? All it would take was a few strategic moves and she could be straddling him. She liked it like that. She liked to pin him down and ride him slowly. She liked having control of his hungry mouth. She was wearing a skirt, and his trouser zip was no real barrier. He could sit here and let her put him on another planet without having to do very much.
‘You’re thinking about it,’ she murmured softly, reading his thoughts as if they belonged to her. ‘Are you worried that we might get caught in the act?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘And you are a tease.’
It was her turn to offer a sensuous little, ‘Mmm.’
She kissed him again, holding his face between both hands now, and flexing her body with pleasure when his hands arrived at her waist. It was now or not at all, he told himself ruefully. She wanted him and he wanted her, so what was holding him back?
He frowned at the question. She sensed the frown and pulled back so she could look at him. ‘I don’t want to be a nuisance,’ she drawled, ever so politely, and went to pull right back.
Which just about finished him.
His hand snaked up beneath her skirt and located her p
anties. He stripped them away without losing contact with her darkening, promising, beautiful eyes. Next he dealt with his fly zip, then picked her up and repositioned her across his lap.
The feel of him sliding into her dragged the air from her throat. She quivered, then settled on him for the few seconds it took for those first sensual tugs of her muscles to mould themselves around him. After that she rode him, slow and deep, his hands encasing her smooth behind, hers still framing his face. Eyes locked, breathing warm and heavy, she brought him to the edge.
‘I love you,’ she whispered, and tightened her muscles around him as he shattered, taking her with him as he did.
Afterwards she lay against him, shocked, he suspected, at what she’d encouraged them to do. ‘You think I’m a hussy.’ She confirmed his suspicions.
‘I think you are amazingly, naturally generous, the way you give yourself to me.’ He lifted a hand to her hair so he could use it to bring them face to face. ‘I’m sorry I messed it up for us,’ he said deeply. ‘I mean to do better this time, I promise you.
‘I just want you to love me,’ she confided, and it was so vulnerable it made his heart clench.
‘I do—believe me.’ He kissed her gently, then added lightly, ‘I am also fertile. Has it occurred to you yet that we have made love three times without using protection?’
Then, while she stared at him in shock at his revelation, he stood up with her still closed around him and made the few strides it took to take them to the tiny bathroom…
Christmas had already come to London. Festive lights hung across the streets and decorated shop windows.
Gino was driving them, with Parsons seated at his side and the usual glass partition separating the front of the car from the rear.
Nina sat quietly beside Rafael. She had not spoken much in the last hour and neither had he. She was still shocked by what he’d said to her on the plane—even more shocked at the casual way he had said it. Why he wasn’t talking was less easy to explain.
She turned an anxious look on his smooth profile and instantly felt a warm feeling pool in the pit of her stomach. She had barely seen him as a living, breathing human being twelve short hours ago, and now he had become the very centre of her universe—again.
How had he managed to do that?
How had he turned this marriage of theirs around without seeming to do anything much at all other than argue a lot and—?
She tried shutting the next thought off before it got started, but she seemed to have lost the ability to do that. The walls had tumbled, leaving her open and exposed and feeling so very vulnerable that she wasn’t at all certain she wanted to feel like this.
Warm and alive and fizzing with feeling. The champagne bubbles of earlier had nothing on what was circulating in her blood right now.
Awareness—sexual awareness—spiced up with words of love…
He still had her panties. He’d refused to give them back to her, and now here she was, fizzing away in the knowledge that she was sitting here primly beside him with no underwear on because it was stuffed in his jacket pocket.
And could you tell that from that smooth, lean, too-handsome-to-be-true profile? No, you could not. The chin was level, the mouth flat, there wasn’t a hair out of place on his dark silk head or a single crease in his dark suit that might hint he had been doing anything other than travelling from A to B in the trouble-free ease with which sophisticated and wealthy businessmen expected to travel.
Rafael had walls of his own that kept people out when he wanted it that way. He’d allowed her a glimpse of the vulnerable man earlier, the needy man—both emotionally and physically—the man with weaknesses and fears like everyone else. But he’d let her see that man once before, only to slam the walls up when she’d dared to step too far over the line.
Where was the line going to be this time? Where were they about to go from here? How could he be so calm about them having unprotected sex when only six months ago the very idea that he could be sowing fertile seed had horrified him?
‘You’re sure you don’t mind about—?’
‘Yes,’ he responded. That was all. After hours of silence between them he’d anticipated what she had been about to ask him and given his answer, neat and precise.
Nina pressed her lips together and looked to the front again. What was that reply supposed to represent? Don’t speak about it because I might change my mind? Or why bother to ask when the deed has been done?
A fatalist. Was he a fatalist? Was she being a complete fool to let him close again when he’d proved time after time that he could let her down badly when she needed him most?
The car turned into one of those streets that made Mayfair the exclusive district it was. As Gino guided it into its reserved off-road parking space Nina looked up at the elegant building which housed elegant apartments for elegant people.
Her father had used to own an apartment like this. Her mother had it now, left to her as her only bequest from Richard St James, along with a cold comment: The only part of my life that gave my wife pleasure. He’d been referring to the apartment’s position within the high society life Louisa loved to live. Her father had been a cold man, and very bitter by the end. He’d loved Nina in a fashion—but not enough to let her warm his heart.
Rafael was like that. A man whose needs were tempered by the amount of feeling he was prepared to give out.
The car engine went silent. Parsons got out and opened Nina’s door for her. Nobody spoke as all four of them walked towards the glass doors through which Louisa had spied Rafael and Marisia waiting for the lift to come.
Marisia…A sudden cold little draft feathered Nina’s skin. They still had not finished with the Marisia thing, and Rafael had brought her here, and they had stood together in this very foyer, touching and gazing at each other intimately.
The lift was there waiting for them, instead of the other way round, so they rode it together—the man and his wife, the butler and the chauffeur-cum-bodyguard.
An odd bunch, Nina thought wryly.
Beside her, Rafael shifted his stance and she glanced up, met with a pair of half-hidden glinting black eyes. He wasn’t hiding, he was waiting, she realised. Biding his time until he got her alone and begin the whole sensual experience all over again.
Had he ridden in this lift wearing the same look for Marisia?
Stop it, she told herself crossly. This is just being silly.
But even as they emptied out of the lift tension was beginning to creep up her spine. What if she found something inside the apartment—proof that there had been more to Rafael and Marisia’s night together than just—?
His hand came to rest at the base of her spine as they waited for Gino to use his key to open the apartment door. Maybe he could feel her tension, because she felt his fingers begin to knead.
It was better to move away—easy to do it when she could follow Gino through the door.
‘Go and get some sleep,’ Rafael told Parsons and Gino as soon as they were all inside.
‘You don’t want me to make something warm to drink before I—?’
‘No—thank you,’ he murmured politely to the butler. ‘Grazie, Gino.’
The chauffeur was wiser than Parsons. He knew when they were not wanted. With a nod he ushered the butler towards the back of the apartment, where their private rooms were situated.
And then they were alone.
‘Shall we do the same?’ he invited softly, and Nina jerked into movement, walking forward down the spacious hallway, bypassing the elegant reception rooms on either side of her and only pausing when she found herself standing in the centre of the bedroom they’d used to share.
Removing her coat as she looked around her, she was aware of Rafael standing in the doorway, watching her familiarise herself with the straw-coloured walls, the dark furniture and the soft furnishings in subtle shades of copper and bronze.
She was looking for signs of female occupation. She knew it; he knew it.
/> ‘Found anything?’ he asked.
She made no answer. Instead she dropped her coat across the back of one of the soft-cushioned chairs that flanked the white marble fireplace, then turned to head for the connecting bathroom.
‘Don’t try it, cara,’ his smooth voice advised her. ‘If something is bothering you then say so, but do not walk away.’
‘All right.’ She spun round to face him.
He was propping up the doorway with a broad shoulder, arms casually folded across his chest and everything about him as relaxed as a man could get. But it was all just a front, because there was nothing relaxed about his narrow-eyed, flat-lipped expression. He was ready for this.
‘Where did she sleep?’ she demanded.
‘In the small guest room at the end of the hall,’ he supplied.
‘No diversions along the way?’ she challenged. ‘No deep and meaningful talks over a pot of coffee followed by some comforting hugs and kisses to reassure her? You just marched her down the hall to the small guest room and shut her inside it, then shut yourself in here?’
‘You asked me where she slept, not what came beforehand,’ he answered smoothly. ‘I’ve told you nothing happened. Why are you fixating on this?’
‘Because I have an issue about the two of you maintaining contact throughout our marriage,’ she said. ‘It’s all a bit too cosy, very clandestine—and if I catch a whiff of her scent in any corner of this suite I will never believe another word you say to me!’
With that she turned towards the bathroom.
‘She did not come in here.’
‘Good,’ she said, and kept on going.
‘And what you call being clandestine I call being sensitive to your feelings and sympathetic to hers. I all but dumped her for you—does that count for nothing?’
‘No,’ she replied. ‘It sounds like one big cover-up to me.’
‘Cover-up of what?’
Nina twisted back. He still hadn’t moved from the door, but his arms had unfolded and now he was angry. ‘A few nights ago you had another woman sleeping in this apartment.’ She spelled it out for him. ‘Twelve hours ago our marriage was nothing but a very bad joke. Since then I’ve been humiliated in front of my family, thoroughly seduced by you, and uprooted from Sicily and replanted here. My panties now reside in one of your pockets, like some kind of trophy—’
