‘I said I was sorry!’ she cried. ‘I didn’t mean to do it! I was just—’ Engrossed in looking at you, she had been going to say, but stopped herself.
So Sandro put his own biting conclusion to her cutoff sentence. ‘Reacting predictably!’
‘No!’ she denied. ‘I was startled, that was all!’
He didn’t believe her. ‘Prove it,’ he said. ‘If you were only “startled”.’ He mocked the word deridingly and moved against her, his forearms taking most of his weight, though there was enough of it for her to feel completely overwhelmed by the man. ‘Prove it,’ he repeated challengingly. ‘And convince me you were not about to run screaming for cover.’
Her heart began to hammer. This situation was quickly racing out of control. She began to wish she had run screaming for cover, had taken her chance when she’d had it earlier and just got the hell out of this bed before Sandro even opened his eyes!
‘I don’t know what it is you expect me to do to prove something that was sheer reflex!’ she snapped out irritably.
‘Well...’ he drawled, and suddenly he was no longer angry but lazily sardonic, a much more dangerous mood when she found herself trapped beneath him. ‘You could try another reflex reaction, and put your arms around my neck, then pull me down so you could kiss me.’
‘I don’t want to kiss you.’ She stiffly rebuffed the suggestion.
‘Why not?’ he asked. ‘You were dying to kiss me a few moments ago,’ he taunted provokingly.
Her eyes flashed with comprehension. ‘You were watching me look at you!’ she accused him in mortified horror.
‘Mmm,’ he admitted with a lazy smugness. ‘I found it most arousing to have your eyes caress my body like that.’
She shut those stupid eyes, wishing herself a million miles away from here now, and tried to move out from beneath him. Only to go perfectly still when the movement made her so intensely aware of his long, lean, warm nakedness that her cheeks bloomed with heat—the same heat that began running along her veins in a helter-skelter ride of wild exhilaration.
‘Are you going to kiss me?’
She shook her head, keeping her eyes tightly shut while her breasts heaved against his resting chest, and her abdomen began to curl with tension.
Did he know what was happening to her? She was sure he knew, because of the way he laid his next silken challenge before her. ‘You would prefer it if I moved away from you?’ he suggested. ‘Give you back your own space?’
Her hands snapped up of their own volition, anchoring themselves around his neck. Sandro laughed, all male, all sexually confident male.
‘You will understand, mi amore,’ he continued in that same tormenting vein, ‘that when I insist that you must kiss me, it is only because I have no wish to be accused of coercing you in any way.’
And this wasn’t coercion? Having a full-blooded half-naked male resting sensually against her was not a terrible coercion in itself? Having these strong brown arms enclosing her, and that beautifully muscled torso pressing down on her, and one of those powerful thighs of his hooked across her own was just about the worst coercion she had ever experienced.
Then one of his hands gently cupped her breast and she went into emotional overload, groaning out a protest that was more a whimper of surrender as her spine arched and her hand applied the necessary pressure to bring his waiting mouth crushing down on her own.
In seconds her senses were raging wildly again. She seemed to have no control over them any longer! Her hands were doing exactly what they wanted to do, caressing his warm dark skin; her lips were doing what they were desperate to do, greedily tasting him, tasting him everywhere, anywhere she could place her hungry mouth to taste him.
‘Joanna, this is too fast,’ Sandro muttered in a thickened rasp as she literally caught fire beneath him.
And he was no longer taunting. He was no longer playing the sexually confident male who had just threatened to completely devour her. He was trying to subdue her, trying to stem the wild storm.
‘Joanna...’
She caught his mouth in a kiss that devoured him instead, one hand clasped around his nape while the other ran in a feverish sweep down the full length of his back. He arched like a man shot by an arrow, groaned something painful, then just gave himself up to the whole bubbling turmoil, taking over, becoming the hot, hungry and passionate lover she had always known lurked beneath his impossible self-control.
As his touch grew bolder, caressing her where she’d never allowed him to caress her before, she thought elatedly, I can do this! I can actually let this happen now!
Only to feel the whole thing flip over like a spinning coin that falls to the ground to land the wrong way up. Suddenly the panic was back, sizzling along her veins and making her fight instead of encourage. She let out a choked whimper, then was pushing violently away from him, scrambling from the bed, standing swaying dizzily beside it, legs shaking, pulses frantic, her whole mind gone into a complete mental meltdown while Sandro remained where she had pushed him, watching it all happen with a kind of grimly rueful familiarity that almost tore her apart as much as her own sense of failure was managing to do.
He should have been angry, she would have preferred it if he’d got angry! But all he did, after watching her battle with herself for a while, was roll onto his back and drawl lazily, ‘Well, at least that got a whole lot further than it ever did before. Things could well be looking up for us, cara.’
On a choke of distress she ran from the room.
The hour long drive to Orvieto along the main road out of Rome was accomplished in the most appalling tension—hers, not Sandro’s. He, by comparison, seemed incredibly relaxed which, considering the way she had left him in a fierce state of physical arousal, was more distressing to her than the very unpalatable fact that she had been in no lesser state herself.
Yet, when she had eventually forced herself out of their bedroom—having had to wait until he’d decided to vacate it before she would go back in there to shower in the en suite bathroom, and get herself dressed and ready to face another day of pressure Sandro had planned for her—there he’d been, sitting at the table on the sunny breakfast terrace, reached via the small dining room, drinking coffee while he skimmed through a morning newspaper and looking just about as relaxed as anyone could look!
It was amazing. The man definitely had his emotions encased in steel, she’d decided. He had showered, shaved, and was wearing oatmeal-coloured trousers held up by a brown leather belt, and a plain white tee shirt was tucked in at his spare waist. As usual, he shrieked style, even though there was no obvious evidence of his clothes being anything special.
But there it was, Sandro in a nutshell: a man whose style came from within, but which was always evident.
‘Help yourself,’ he’d invited, indicating towards the coffee pot that had stood on the table next to a basket of warm bread rolls. ‘We should try to leave here within the next hour,’ he’d said smoothly. ‘But you have time to eat and drink something before we go.’
She’d said nothing. What could she have said except, Why don’t you put us both out of our misery and let me go again?
Then she’d seen it, tucked in beside her plate, and her eyes had filled with the now too-ready tears, her wretched mouth beginning to quiver. ‘Sandro...’ she’d whispered hoarsely.
‘Shush,’ he’d said, getting up from the table, then bending down to brush a kiss across her pale cheek. ‘Enjoy your breakfast. I have to make a few phone calls before we leave.’
She’d watched him stride back into the apartment, leaving her sitting there feeling wretched, feeling hopeless, feeling utterly, heart-wrenchingly useless, as her fingers gently stroked along the thornless column of the short-stemmed red rose he had placed there for her.
I don’t deserve him, she’d told herself—something she had always, always known.
By the time he’d come back for her the rose had disappeared, having been carefully folded into a napkin and
placed inside her purse for future filing with her precious store of memorabilia. If she ever saw that store again, because she knew she would never ask Sandro for it. That would open up too many cans of wriggling worms that still had to be let loose.
‘Ready?’
She’d nodded and stood up to join him, lifting very guarded eyes to his. But Sandro hadn’t been looking into her face, he’d been too busy checking out what she was wearing, his dark eyes inspecting the cream linen trousers and the tiny cotton top of the same colour. She had managed to get her long hair to plait into a single braid that swung between her shoulderblades this morning. She wore no make-up. It was just too hot. So she had applied some protective cream from the very expensive-looking jar she had found in the bathroom.
Now she wished she’d piled on the make-up, because at least it would have hidden the strained pallor that was back in her face.
Together they had walked through the apartment and out into the upper foyer, where he’d paused hesitantly, then turned towards her. ‘We can go down by the rear fire escape, if you would prefer it,’
It had been a concession she’d felt neither pleased about or grateful for, because it had only highlighted what a pathetic waste of time she was.
‘The lift is fine,’ she’d said coolly and, to prove the point, had stepped up to press the call button herself. Personally, she’d been quietly impressed with the way she’d stood calmly beside him while the lift took them to ground level.
Sandro hadn’t said a word, but what he had done was reach for her hand and raise it to his mouth in a silent praise as they’d waited for the doors to open. And even that small gesture had only managed to make her feel worse, because what had she done except overcome a silly obsession she should have combated years ago?
That was why she was tense__that was why she was silent and withdrawn and very uncommunicative. She was cross with herself because living with her was like living in a minefield—you never knew where the next explosion of panic was going to come from!
She couldn’t, in all fairness, put Sandro through that kind of madness a second time. He had to learn that it just wasn’t worth the effort he was trying to put into it, and the best way to do that was completely freeze him out again.
She could do it, she told herself grimly. She had done it very successfully once before, hadn’t she?
CHAPTER NINE
ORVIETO lay about halfway between Rome and Siena on the Umbrian-Tuscany borders. It was an area of breathtaking beauty, with lush and fertile rolling hillsides covered by row upon row of vine trees broken by thick clusters of woodland. Enchanting old towns capped incredible hilltops which seemed to rise out of the ground for no apparent reason.
Yet, picturesque as the area was, it was so obviously intrinsically rural that she began to wonder what it was here that had caught Sandro’s usually very urban eye.
‘The estate is just over the next hillside,’ Sandro said beside her. ‘Look now,’ he directed.
Her gaze drifted outwards, then simply stilled while she stared open-mouthed at the lovely valley that came into view. Despite her resolve, she responded, ‘Oh, Sandro!’ with a gasp of unrestrained pleasure. ‘This is lovely! How much of it belongs to you?’
‘To us,’ he smoothly corrected. Then, before she could react to that stunning correction, ‘As far as you can see,’ he answered her question, bringing a further gasp escaping from her parted lips.
He turned the car then, steering them in through a gap in the rows of vine trees. It was a private driveway, columned on either side by tall cypresses that led them towards the pretty villa she recognised from the brochure Sandro had shown her the day before.
As they came closer to the house itself the vines began to give way to thick fruit orchards, then the most beautiful gardens set in typically formal Italian style with terraces already blooming with well-behaved colour.
It was, Joanna decided, the most beautiful place she had ever laid eyes on, the house itself looking as though it had sat there for ever, with its red-tiled roof and its yellowing walls basking in the golden sunlight.
Sandro pulled the car to a stop on a tiny cobbled area just in front of the house. Off to one side, Joanna could see what she recognised as the stable block—again looking as if it had always been there. Behind that stood tall, narrow cypress trees, acting like windbreaks or more probably as a boundary line, planted to separate the private accommodation from the working estate.
Joanna climbed out of the car and stood gazing around her, too captivated to maintain the indifference she had been so determined upon.
‘Well?’ Sandro murmured quietly from the other side of the car. ‘What do you think?’
Think? She couldn’t think; this place was just too enchanting for her to be able to think. Feel, maybe; she could feel many things: pleasure, wonder, a yearning desire to belong to this lovely place.
‘Who in their right mind would want to sell this?’ she asked rather breathlessly.
‘The owner’s daughter married a Californian winegrower,’ Sandro explained, coming around the car to stand beside her. ‘They wanted to be close to her, so they put this place up for sale and moved to California. An expedient move on their side,’ he added sagely. ‘For this place may look picture-perfect but in fact it needs a lot of money spending on it to bring it up to New World standards in wine-growing and processing if it is going to compete.’
‘And you fancied taking on the challenge?’ Joanna began to understand at last. This was Sandro being Sandro, seeing a good investment.
But he thoroughly shocked her by saying quietly, ‘I did not buy this for the challenge, Joanna. I bought it for you.’
For her? Her eyes whipped around to stare at him in open-mouthed disbelief. ‘But why me?’ she asked in bewilderment.
He didn’t answer, just smiled a rather odd smile and said, ‘Come on. We may as well inspect the house first.’
Then he was striding off towards the house, leaving her to follow more slowly, with her mind thrown back into clamouring confusion because never, not once, had she ever voiced a desire to live somewhere like this!
So, what was he playing at with his clever word-games? she wondered frowningly. Then, reparation, she remembered, as she followed him into a large, cool entrance hall darkened by the wooden shutters pulled across the windows. Sandro was most definitely still a man on a mission, and that mission included reparation.
‘The house requires some renovation,’ he said, as she came to an uncertain halt just inside the open doorway. ‘But nothing too drastic...’
He was already moving to open the shutters, throwing them back from the long narrow windows to allow light to come streaming in, dust motes dancing in the sunbeams onto disappointingly bare stone floors, plain white walls and a huge rustic fireplace. There was a spiral stairway leading up from a central situation against the far wall and several closed doors flanking either side of it.
But that seemed to be all. ‘It’s empty.’ She voiced the absolute obvious.
‘Si,’ he acknowledged. ‘Which is going to give you a lot to think about as you plan the refurbishing of the whole house.’
Joanna didn’t answer. Her mind was boggling, her natural defensive system grinding into full action simply because she did not understand what was going on here. Yesterday he had implied that they were coming here to start their marriage properly, which meant sex, of course. But to enjoy the kind of sex Sandro had to be thinking about, there first had to be a bed, and this place did not look as if it had one stick of furniture anywhere in it
In a daze, she moved off towards the nearest door and pushed it open to find yet another empty room darkened by wooden shutters covering the windows. ‘What was this?’ she enquired as he came up behind her.
His hands slid around her waist, long fingers easily spanning her. Sensation whipped like electrically charged wire in a tight coil around her whole body, and it took every ounce of self-control she possessed not to jump away from
him like a severely scalded cat.
‘A sitting room,’ he replied. ‘There are two of them—one either side of the front door...’
She nodded, unable to say another word, while he was still holding her. She didn’t even dare breathe in case Sandro realised just how desperately aware she was of him.
‘Shall I throw open the shutters?’
‘Please,’ she said, and almost wilted with relief as his hands left her so he could move past her and throw the room into dust-dancing light.
After that, she was careful to keep her distance from him as they walked from room to room, throwing open shutters and staring round the empty spaces while he described to her what they had been used for by the last owners.
The house was big—bigger than it looked on the outside. Four reception rooms in all, two office-cum-studies and a huge kitchen with quaint old-fashioned fittings that she liked on sight. Upstairs were six large bedrooms but only two bathrooms, which, Sandro informed her, would have to be put right before they could move in here permanently.
There had to be a catch to all of this, she told herself again. There just had to be—or why bring this beautiful place into the conflict at all? After all, he didn’t need it to keep the pressure on her, because he was managing to do that very successfully without it!
So, she held herself tense and silent as they moved from room to room, letting him do the talking, waiting for him to get to the point and finally tell her what the catch was.
They had looked over the whole house and had come back to the hallway before he actually asked her a direct question. ‘So?’ he prompted. ‘Do you like it?’
‘I think it’s delightful,’ she replied. ‘But I don’t understand why you think I should want to live in a place like this?’
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