The Italian's Christmas Secret

by Sharon Kendrick

  ‘So Paola’s been spying on me, has she?’ Keira questioned, her voice dipping with disappointment that the genial housekeeper seemed to have been taking her inventory.

  ‘Don’t be absurd. She was going to clean them for you and couldn’t find any others you could wear in the meantime.’

  Keira scrambled up off the lounger and stared into his hard and beautiful features. He really came from a totally different planet, didn’t he? One which was doubtless inhabited by women who had boots in every colour of the rainbow and not just a rather scuffed brown pair she’d bought in the sales. ‘So don’t take me with you,’ she said flippantly. ‘Leave me behind while you go out to all your fancy places and I can stay home and look after Santino, wearing my solitary pair of boots.’

  A flicker of a smile touched the corners of his lips, but just as quickly it was gone. ‘That isn’t an option, I’m afraid,’ he said smoothly. ‘You’re going to have to meet people. Not just my friends and the people who work for me, but my father and stepmother at some point. And my stepbrother,’ he finished, his mouth twisting before his gaze fixed her with its ebony blaze. ‘The way you look at the moment means you won’t fit in. Not anywhere,’ he continued brutally. ‘And there’s the chance that people will talk about you if you behave like some kind of hermit, which won’t make things easy for you. Apart from anything else, we need to learn more about each other.’ He hesitated. ‘We are parents, with a child and a future to consider. We need to discuss the options open to us and that won’t be possible if we continue to be strangers to one another.’

  ‘You haven’t bothered coming near me since we got here,’ she said quietly. ‘You’ve been keeping your distance, haven’t you?’

  ‘Can you blame me? You were almost on your knees with exhaustion when you arrived.’ He paused as his eyes swept over her again. ‘But you look like a different person now.’

  Keira was taken aback by the way her body responded to that slow scrutiny, wondering how he could make her feel so many different things, simply by looking at her. And if that was the case, shouldn’t she be protecting herself from his persuasive power over her, instead of going on a falsely intimate trip to Rome?

  ‘I told you. I don’t want to leave the baby,’ she said stubbornly.

  ‘Is that what’s known as playing your trump card?’ he questioned softly. ‘Making me out to be some cruel tyrant who’s dragging you away from your child?’

  ‘He’s only little! Not that you’d know, of course.’ She paused and lifted her chin. ‘You’ve hardly gone near him.’

  Matteo acknowledged the unmistakable challenge in her voice and he felt a sudden chill ice his skin, despite the warmth of the October day. How audacious of her to interrogate him about his behaviour when her own had hardly been exemplary. By her keeping Santino’s existence secret he had been presented with a baby, instead of having time to get used to the idea that he was to become a father.

  Yet her pointed remark about his lack of interaction struck home, because what she said was true. He had kept his distance from Santino, telling himself that these things could not be rushed and needed time. And she had no right to demand anything of him, he thought bitterly. He would do things according to his agenda, not hers.

  ‘Rome isn’t far,’ he said coolly. ‘It is exactly two hundred kilometres. And I have a car constantly on standby.’

  ‘Funnily enough that’s something I do remember—being at your beck and call!’

  ‘Then you will know there’s no problem,’ he said drily. ‘Particularly as my driver is solid and reliable and not given to taking off to remote areas of the countryside in adverse weather conditions.’

  ‘Very funny,’ she said.

  ‘We can be back here in an hour and a half should the need arise. We’ll leave here at ten tomorrow morning—and be back early the next day. Less than twenty-four hours in the eternal city.’ He gave a faintly cynical laugh. ‘Don’t women usually go weak at the knees at the prospect of an unlimited budget to spend on clothes?’

  ‘Some women, maybe,’ she said. ‘Not me.’

  But Keira’s stubbornness was more than her determination not to become a rich man’s doll. She didn’t know about fashion—and the thought of what she might be expected to wear scared her. Perhaps if she’d been less of a tomboy, she might have flicked through glossy magazines like other women her age. She might have had some idea of what did and didn’t suit her and would now be feeling a degree of excitement instead of dread. Fear suddenly became defiance and she glared at him.

  ‘You are the bossiest man I’ve ever met!’ she declared, pushing a handful of hair over her shoulder.

  ‘And you are the most difficult woman I’ve ever encountered,’ he countered. ‘A little gratitude might go down well now and again.’

  What, gratitude for his high-handedness and for making her feel stuff she’d rather not feel? Keira shook her head in frustration as she tugged her T-shirt down over her straining jeans.

  ‘I’ll be ready at ten,’ she said, and went off to find Santino.

  She put the baby in his smart new buggy to take him for a walk around the estate, slowly becoming aware that the weather had changed. The air had grown heavy and sultry and heavy clouds were beginning to accumulate on the horizon, like gathering troops. When eventually they returned to the farmhouse, Santino took longer than usual to settle for his sleep and Keira was feeling out of sorts when Paola came to ask whether she would be joining Signor Valenti for dinner that evening.

  It was the first time she’d received such an invitation and Keira hesitated for a moment before declining. Up until now, she’d eaten her supper alone or with Claudia and she saw no reason to change that routine. She was going to be stuck with Matteo in Rome when clearly they were going to have to address some of the issues confronting them. Why waste conversation during a stilted dinner she had no desire to eat, especially when the atmosphere felt so close and heavy?

  Fanning her face with her hand, she showered before bed but her skin still felt clammy, even after she’d towelled herself dry. Peering up into the sky, she thought she saw a distant flash of lightning through the thick curtain of clouds. She closed the shutters and brushed her hair before climbing into bed, but sleep stubbornly eluded her. She wished the occasional growl of thunder would produce the threatened rain and break some of the tension in the atmosphere and was just drifting off into an uneasy sleep when her wish came true. A loud clap of thunder echoed through the room and made her sit bolt upright in bed. There was a loud whoosh and heavy rain began to hurl down outside her window and quickly she got up and crept into Santino’s room but, to her surprise, the baby was sound asleep.

  How did he manage to do that? she thought enviously—feeling even more wide awake than before. She sighed as she went back to bed and the minutes ticked by, and all she could think about was how grim she was going to look, with dark shadowed eyes and a pasty face. Another clap of thunder made her decide that a warm drink might help relax her. And wasn’t there a whole stack of herb teas in the kitchen?

  To the loud tattoo of drumming rain, she crept downstairs to the kitchen with its big, old-fashioned range and lines of shiny copper pots hanging in a row. She switched on some low lighting and not for the first time found herself wistfully thinking how homely it looked—and how it was unlike any place she had imagined the urbane Matteo Valenti would own.

  She had just made herself a cup of camomile tea when she heard a sound behind her and she jumped, her heart hammering as loudly as the rain as she turned to see Matteo standing framed in the doorway. He was wearing nothing but a pair of faded denims, which were clinging almost indecently to his long and muscular thighs. His mouth was unsmiling but there was a gleam in his coal-dark eyes, which made awareness drift uncomfortably over her skin and suddenly Keira began to shiver uncontrollably, her nipples tightening beneath her nightshirt.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE WALLS SEEMED to close in on her and Keira was suddenly ac
hingly conscious of being alone in the kitchen with a half-naked Matteo, while outside she could hear the rain howl down against the shuttered windows.

  With a shaking hand she put her mug down, her eyes still irresistibly drawn to the faded jeans which hugged his long and muscular thighs. He must have pulled them on in a hurry because the top button was undone, displaying a line of dark hair which arrowed tantalisingly downwards. Soft light bathed his bare and gleaming torso, emphasising washboard abs and broad shoulders.

  She realised with a start that she’d never seen his naked torso before—or at least hadn’t really noticed it. She’d been so blown away when they’d been having sex that her eyes hadn’t seemed able to focus on anything at all. But now she could see him in all his beauty—a dark and forbidding beauty, but beauty all the same. And despite all the stuff between them, despite the fact that they’d been snapping at each other like crocodiles this afternoon, she could feel herself responding to him, and there didn’t seem to be a thing she could do about it.

  Beneath her nightshirt her nipples were growing even tighter and her breasts were heavy. She could feel a warm melting tug at her groin and the sensation was so intense that she found herself shifting her weight uncomfortably from one bare foot to the other. She opened her mouth to say something, but no words came.

  He stared at her, a strange and mocking half-smile at his lips, as if he knew exactly what was happening to her. ‘What’s the matter, Keira?’ he queried silkily. ‘Can’t sleep?’

  She struggled to find the correct response. To behave as anyone else would in the circumstances.

  Like a woman drinking herb tea and not wishing that he would put his hand between her legs to stop this terrible aching.

  ‘No. I can’t. This wretched storm is keeping me awake.’ She forced a smile. ‘And neither could you, obviously.’

  ‘I heard someone moving around in the kitchen, so I came to investigate.’ He stared down at her empty cup. ‘Is the tea working?’

  She thought about pretending but what was the point? ‘Not really,’ she admitted as another crash of thunder echoed through the room. ‘I’m still wide awake and I’m probably going to stay that way until the storm dies down.’

  There was a pause while Matteo’s gaze drifted over her and he thought how pale she looked standing there with her nightshirt brushing against her bare thighs and hair spilling like dark silk over her shoulders. Bare-footed, she looked tiny—a tantalising mixture of vulnerability and promise—and it felt more potent than anything he’d ever experienced. She was trying to resist him, he knew that, yet the look in her eyes told him that inside she was aching as much as he was. He knew what he was going to do because he couldn’t put it off any longer, and although the voice of his conscience was sounding loud in his ears, he took no notice of it. She needed to relax a little—for all their sakes.

  ‘Maybe you should try a little distraction technique,’ he said.

  Her eyes narrowed. ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Come and look at the view from my study,’ he suggested evenly. ‘It’s spectacular at the best of times, but during a storm it’s unbelievable.’

  Keira hesitated because it felt as if he were inviting her into the lion’s lair, but surely anything would be better than standing there feeling totally out of her depth. What else was she going to do—go back to bed and lie there feeling sorry for herself? And they were leaving for Rome tomorrow. Perhaps she should drop her guard a little. Perhaps they should start trying to be friends.

  ‘Sure,’ she said, with a shrug. ‘Why not?’

  His study was in a different wing of the house, which hadn’t featured in the guided tour he’d given her at the beginning of the week—an upstairs room sited at the far end of a vast, beamed sitting room. She followed him into the book-lined room, her introspection vanishing the instant she saw the light show taking place outside the window. Her lips fell open as she stood watching the sky blindingly illuminated by sheet lightning, which lit up the dark outlines of the surrounding mountains. Each bright flash was reflected in the surface of the distant lake, so that the dramatic effect of what she was seeing was doubled. ‘It’s...amazing,’ she breathed.

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  He had come to stand beside her—so close that he was almost touching and Keira held her breath, wanting him to touch her, praying for him to touch her. Did he guess that? Was that why he slid his arm around her shoulders, his fingers beginning to massage the tense and knotted muscles?

  She looked up into the hard gleam of his eyes, startled by the dark look of hunger on his face.

  ‘Shall we put a stop to all this right now, Keira?’ he murmured. ‘Because we both know that the damned storm has nothing to do with our inability to sleep. It’s desire, isn’t it? Two people lying in their lonely beds, just longing to reach out to one another.’

  His hands had slipped to her upper arms, and as his hard-boned face swam in and out of focus Keira told herself to break away and escape to the sanctuary of her room. Yet her body was stubbornly refusing to obey. All she could seem to focus on were his lips and how good it felt to have him touching her like this. She’d never stood in a storm-lit room with a half-dressed man, completely naked beneath her frumpy nightshirt, and yet she knew exactly what was going to happen next. She could feel it. Smell it. She swayed. Could almost taste the desire which was bombarding her senses and making her pounding heart the only thing she could hear above the loud hammer of the rain.

  ‘Isn’t that so?’ he continued, brushing hair away from her face as the pad of his thumb stroked its way over her trembling lips. ‘You want me to kiss you, don’t you, Keira? You want it really quite badly.’

  Keira resented the arrogance of that swaggering statement—but not enough to make her deny the truth behind it. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I do.’

  Matteo tensed, her whispered assent sharpening his already keen hunger, and he pulled her against his body and crushed his mouth over hers. And, oh, she tasted good. Better than good. Better than he remembered—but maybe that was because her kiss had lingered in his memory far longer than it should have done. He tried to go slowly but his usual patience fled as his hands began to rediscover her small and compact body. Before she had been incredibly lean—he remembered narrow hips and the bony ladder of her ribcage. But now those bones had disappeared beneath a layer of new flesh, which was soft and tempting and just ripe for licking.

  Her head tipped back as he rucked up her nightshirt, his hand burrowing beneath the bunched cotton until he had bared her breast. He bent his head to take one taut rosebud in between his lips and felt her fingers digging into his bare shoulders as he grazed the sensitive areola between his teeth. Already he felt as if he wanted to explode—as if he would die if he’d didn’t quickly impale her. Was the fact that she’d borne his child the reason why he was feeling a desire which felt almost primitive in its intensity? Was that why his hands were trembling like this?

  ‘Do you know how long I’ve been wanting to do this?’ he husked, his fingers sliding down between her breasts and caressing their silken weight. ‘Every second of every day.’

  Her reply was a muffled gasp against his mouth. ‘Is that why you’ve stayed away from me?’

  ‘That’s exactly why.’ He let his fingertips trickle down over her belly and heard her catch her breath as they travelled further downwards. ‘You needed to rest and I was trying to be a...gentleman,’ he growled.

  ‘And how does this qualify as being...oh!’ Her words faded away as he slid his hand between her legs, brushing over the soft fuzz of hair to find the molten heat beneath.

  ‘You were saying?’ he breathed as he dampened his finger in the soft, wet folds before starting to stroke the little bud which was already so tight.

  He heard her give a shaky swallow. ‘Matteo, this is...is...’

  He knew exactly what it was. It was arousing her to a state where she was going to come any second, and while it was turning him on to discover how cl
ose to the edge she was—it was also making his own frustration threaten to implode. With a necessary care which defied his hungry impatience, he eased the zip of his jeans down over his straining hardness—breathing a sigh of relief as his massive erection sprang free. The denim concertinaed around his ankles but he didn’t care. He knew propriety dictated he should take them off, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t wait, not a second longer.

  Impatiently he pushed her back against his desk, shoving aside his computer and paperwork with uncharacteristic haste. And the moment the moist tip of his penis touched her, she seemed to go wild, clawing eagerly at his back—and it took more concentration than he’d ever needed to force himself to pull back. Through the distracting fog of desire, he recalled the condom concealed in a drawer of his desk and by the time it was in place he felt as excited as a teenage boy as his hungry gaze skated over her.

  Like a sacrifice she lay on the desk, her arms stretched indolently above her head as he leaned over to make that first thrust deep inside her. And this time there was no pain or hesitation. This time there was nothing but a gasped cry of pleasure as he filled her. Greedily, he sank even deeper and then he rode her—and even the crash of something falling from the desk wasn’t enough to put him off his stroke. Or maybe it was just another crash of thunder from the storm outside. Who cared? He rode her until she came, her frantic convulsions starting only fractionally before his own, so that they moved in perfect time before his ragged groan heralded the end and he slumped on top of her, her hands clasped around the sweat-sheened skin of his back.

  He didn’t say anything at first, unwilling to shatter the unfamiliar peace he felt as he listened to the quietening of his heart. He felt spent. As if she had milked him dry. As if he could have fallen asleep right there, despite the hardness of the wooden surface. He forced himself to open his eyes and to take stock of their surroundings. Imagine if they were discovered here in the morning by one of the cleaners, or by Paola—already surprised that, not only had he brought a woman here, but he had a baby son.