‘Marco...’ she whispered, with uncertainty in her voice and something else that made his need darker and more dangerous.
‘You came to my room, cara.’
‘I heard you call out. You sounded—’ Leah broke off.
Marco guessed it had been bad. His throat felt raw and he remembered that in the dream he had been shouting. Snatches of the nightmare returned. The car with Nicky inside. Smoke and flames as he fought to open the door and save his son.
‘I thought there might be something I could do to help you.’
Leah’s voice pulled him from the darkness of his thoughts.
‘There is.’
He leaned even closer to her and sank his hands into her glorious hair. And then he did what he had wanted to do for ever, it seemed. He kissed her.
Her soft sigh filled his mouth and the sweet taste of her made him groan. He fell back against the pillows, pulling her down with him, his lips not leaving hers for a second. Her riotous curls cascaded around them like a fragrant curtain and he wound his fingers through the silky strands, angling her head so that he could kiss her again and again.
And she let him. More than let him, Marco thought, aware of an odd feeling inside him when she parted her lips beneath his. He told himself the feeling was satisfaction that he finally had her where he wanted her—in his bed.
He rolled her onto her back and stretched out next to her, propping himself up on one elbow. Her breasts rose and fell jerkily, and a flush of sexual warmth spread down her neck and décolletage.
‘Tell me what you want,’ he commanded. ‘For me to kiss you here?’ He pressed his lips to the little hollow behind her ear and heard her draw a shaky breath. ‘Or here?’ He trailed kisses down her cheek to the corner of her mouth.
‘Yes.’
The simple honesty of her surrender stormed through him and Marco reminded himself that this was about sex—nothing more. He traced his mouth over the slopes of her breasts to the lacy edge of her negligee and untied the ribbon that held the front together. Slowly he pushed the satin aside and bared the breasts that he’d fantasised about far too often. He exhaled heavily as he studied the perfect roundness of her pale breasts tipped with rosy nipples.
‘Ah, beauty...’ He hardly recognised his own voice, so thick was it—so slurred with desire, as if he’d been drugged.
He had never wanted any woman as desperately as he wanted Leah. The realisation set an alarm bell ringing in his mind, but he could not resist the siren song of her body, and he liked it too much when a shiver ran through her as he cupped one creamy mound in his palm and bent his head to draw the stiff peak at its centre into his mouth.
The low moan she made tore through him. Surely his virgin bride could not be such an innocent? But he sensed that this was all new for her, and felt something worryingly like possessiveness surge through him.
If he was a better man he would send her back through the connecting door and advise her to keep it locked from now on. But the scent of her teased his senses: a delicate floral perfume mixed with the earthy sweetness of her feminine arousal. His body felt taut with need, but Leah needed careful handling and he was determined not to rush her.
* * *
Leah sucked in a breath. She was shaking, and every inch of her body felt too hot, too needy. Marco’s hands were everywhere—cupping her breasts, then sliding down over her stomach and thighs. She had not even been aware of him removing her negligee. His fingertips traced patterns over her skin and every caress made the fire inside her burn hotter.
When he flicked his thumb-pad across the hard peak of one nipple, and then its twin, she twisted her hips restlessly, wanting to be even closer to him, desperate for him to assuage the ache deep in her pelvis.
‘Touch me.’
The rasp of his voice made the trembling in her limbs worse. She placed her hands on his chest and felt the uneven thud of his heart. He was all muscle and sinew, darkly tanned skin and whorls of black chest hair that arrowed over his taut abdomen and disappeared beneath the sheet draped low over his hips.
The idea that he might be naked beneath the sheet made her heart thud harder. But her thoughts scattered when he slipped his hand between her thighs and stroked his finger over the lace panel of her knickers. An age-old instinct took over and she arched against his hand, needing more, needing—
‘Oh...’ A shudder ran through her as he pushed her panties aside so that he had access to the molten heart of her femininity. The wetness between her legs betrayed her. She could no longer deny that she desired him, and she caught her breath as he stroked his finger up and down her opening before he parted her and slid in deep.
It felt different from when she touched herself. It was shockingly intimate and utterly addictive as he began to move his hand in a rhythmic motion: pressing forward, withdrawing, pressing, withdrawing... Ripples tightened across her belly as pleasure built inside her. She closed her eyes, her entire being focused on the slide of his finger.
He rubbed his thumb-pad against the hard nub of her core and she shattered. It was indescribable—starbursts of glorious sensation so intense that it almost hurt. She’d read about mind-blowing orgasms, but this was so much more than she’d imagined—emotionally as well as physically.
She felt closer to Marco than she’d ever felt to any other human being, and gave a sigh of protest when he rolled away from her.
‘I’m not going far, cara.’
His voice was indulgent, and the satisfaction Leah heard in his tone evoked a faint unease when he murmured, ‘I assume you want me to take care of protection?’
Her eyes flew open and she stared at their reflection in the mirror above the bed. She did not recognise that wanton woman with her wild red hair spread across the pillows, naked apart from the strip of blue lace between her legs that had not been any barrier to Marco’s bold caresses.
How had she got here?
A memory pushed through the fog of sexual delight. In her mind she heard Marco shouting a name. Karin.
He was opening the bedside drawer and taking out a packet of condoms. The cold reality of the situation doused Leah like a shower of ice. She had been compelled by Marco’s haunting cries to rush into his room and wake him from his nightmare. When he’d kissed her she’d gone up in flames. But she was not the woman he wanted.
‘No!’ She jerked upright and grabbed her negligee, dragging it inelegantly over her head.
‘No?’ Marco’s eyes narrowed until they were gleaming slits of polished steel, but he did not move towards her or try to prevent her from scrambling across the bed away from him. ‘That’s not the message you gave me a few minutes ago.’
‘I won’t be a substitute for your first wife.’
He stiffened and jerked his head back, shock and another indefinable emotion chasing across his stern features.
Silence stretched between them, simmering with tension.
‘You called out for Karin in your dream,’ Leah muttered.
While Marco had been kissing her, had he been thinking of his beautiful wife, whose photograph he kept in every room of his home?
‘I’m not her.’
He laughed then, but it was an oddly harsh sound that held no humour. ‘No. You are certainly not her.’
She caught her lower lip between her teeth as she tied the ribbon at the front of her negligee with hands that visibly trembled. She felt vulnerable and exposed—humiliated when she thought of how he’d watched her in the throes of orgasm.
With a muffled cry she went to stand up, but he caught hold of her arm and tugged her back down onto the bed.
‘Leah. You are the only woman I want right now.’ Marco feathered his fingertips along her collarbone. ‘You feel the attraction between us as much as I do,’ he murmured in a molten honey voice as he held his thumb over the pulse thudding at the base of her throat. ‘This
fire is not going to burn out any time soon.’
But all fires died when there was nothing to feed the flames, Leah thought. The spark of desire Marco felt for her would not last long.
He bent his dark head and she felt the silken brush of his hair on her skin as he pressed his lips against the side of her neck. ‘You want to give yourself to me, beauty.’
So confident. So sure of himself—and of her. But she wasn’t gullible, as her mother had been too often with lovers who had promised everything and given nothing.
‘No,’ she said firmly, pulling away from him and sliding off the bed. ‘Sex isn’t part of our deal.’
She sped into her own room as if the hounds of hell were snapping at her heels. As she shut the door she heard Marco’s lazy drawl.
‘It will be, cara. A year is a long time to fight the raging desire we both feel.’
* * *
The sound of the helicopter flying over Villa Rosa sent Leah’s stomach into a nose-dive. She had learned from the housekeeper, Assumpta, that Marco was coming home today. It would have been nice if he’d phoned her and told her of his plans, she thought with a grimace. But he hadn’t been in contact for the past week, since he’d left Capri to go on a business trip.
She had dreaded facing him at breakfast the morning after she’d gone into his room. Memories of how he had seduced her with his addictive kisses and pleasured her with his wickedly inventive hands had made her shudder with shame. But the butterflies in her stomach had been for nothing.
Signor De Valle had left in the helicopter very early, Assumpta had explained.
Now, Leah collected up the number cards she had been using to test Nicky’s numeracy skills. ‘That’s enough sums for today. I think your papà has arrived. Are you looking forward to seeing him?’
Nicky nodded, and his shy smile tugged on her heart.
Every afternoon they went to the pool, so that she could teach him to swim. Supporting his little body while he kicked his legs reminded her of being in the hydrotherapy pool with her brother. Sammy had loved those sessions with the physiotherapist, but as his illness had progressed he’d become too weak to swim.
Being with Nicky was helping to mend the hole that had ripped open Leah’s heart when Sammy had died. But her role in Nicky’s life was not permanent, and it was important that he developed a trusting relationship with his father. Sadly that was impossible when Marco was never around.
‘Let’s go and see if Assumpta has your lunch ready,’ she said to the little boy. ‘Maybe your papà will come swimming this afternoon?’
He would if she had anything to do with it, she vowed a short while later, as she tried to ignore the frantic thud of her heart and knocked on the study door.
At his curt command she stepped into the room. Marco was on his phone, of course. He looked over at her and the predatory hunger in his eyes was shockingly exciting. Heat flared in her belly and she felt a betraying blush spread over her cheeks.
He finished the call and leaned back in his chair. ‘Don’t hover as if you’re planning to scamper out of the door like a frightened rabbit. I’m not going to bite you,’ he drawled.
She ground her teeth as she sat down on the chair in front of his desk. ‘I’m here to discuss your son,’ Leah said stiffly. ‘And to show you this.’
She pushed a piece of paper on which Nicky had drawn a picture of his father across the desk.
A nerve flickered in Marco’s cheek as he stared at the childish representation of himself. In the picture, the jagged line running down his face was obviously meant to be his scar. Nicky had scribbled it in red crayon over the paper.
‘I asked him if the red was meant to be blood and he became upset,’ Leah said quietly.
‘What does it mean? Why did Nicky draw this?’
‘I don’t know. I’m not a psychotherapist.’ She leaned across the desk and held Marco’s gaze. ‘But I know Nicky needs to spend more time with you. I am convinced that his problems are linked to his relationship, or lack of one, with you. He needs you to be more involved with him.’
Leah gave a sigh of frustration when Marco stood up abruptly and strode over to the window.
She stared at his stiff back. ‘Don’t you want to be closer to Nicky?’
‘Of course I do,’ he said, in an agonised voice that tugged at Leah’s heart.
He spun round and glared at her, and she was startled by the raw emotion on his face. His skin was drawn tight over his cheekbones and his scar was a livid white mark standing out against his olive complexion.
‘I don’t know how to be a good father.’
‘You had a good relationship with your own father, didn’t you?’ she probed gently.
‘I didn’t spend much time with him, to be honest. He worked away for weeks at a time, and when he came back to Nancarrow Hall he was mainly interested in talking to me about the business. He used to joke that he was training me early to take his place.’ Marco shrugged. ‘Perhaps he had a premonition that he would die young.’
Leah remembered Marco had told her that after his father had died and his mother had remarried he had been sent away to school.
‘Who ran the company until you were old enough to be CEO?’ she asked.
‘Tia Benedetta’s late husband—Tio Federico.’ Marco’s face softened ‘He was a good, kind man and he treated me like the son he never had.’
‘You have a son.’ Leah was too agitated to remain sitting, and she jumped up and walked around the desk. ‘I implore you to make time for Nicky. You are the only parent he has and you must be the hands-on father he is so desperate for—starting from now.’
‘You don’t understand.’ A nerve jumped in his cheek. ‘When Nicky was inside the wreckage after the accident I could smell petrol. I was scared the car would catch fire before I could save him.’ Marco swallowed convulsively. ‘Finally I managed to get the door open. Nicky was wearing a seat belt, but he was limp and grey and I believed he was dead.’
Leah’s heart clenched. The horror of the accident had left Marco traumatised as well as Nicky, she realised. But Marco’s way of dealing with his emotions was to ignore them.
‘Are you afraid to love your son because you can’t bear the idea of losing him to another accident or a serious illness?’ she said softly.
His jaw clenched. ‘How the hell can you know that?’
‘When my brother died it hurt so much I never wanted to love anyone again. But none of us can live our lives in fear of what might happen in the future. Nicky needs to know that you love him.’
‘I don’t think he likes me.’ Marco ran his fingers through his hair until it stood on end.
‘He doesn’t know you.’ Leah put her hand on Marco’s arm. ‘Take some time off work, turn off your laptop and phone and give fatherhood a chance.’
His eyes locked with hers, and Leah felt as though her heart was being squeezed when he said gruffly, ‘I need you to help me.’
‘I will. We made a deal, remember?’ she said lightly, trying to ease the tension.
He gave her a speculative look. ‘I am hardly likely to forget, cara.’
This was a different Marco. He was allowing her to see the man behind the mask and revealing that he was vulnerable—at least where his son was concerned. When she had believed him to be cold and heartless it had been easier to tell herself that her awareness of him was a purely physical response, Leah thought ruefully. But now she had discovered that he was a complex man and her feelings for him were complicated.
She suddenly wished that they had met in the normal way and been attracted to each other without the marriage negotiation which was a barrier between them. Instead she was his wife in name only. Which was what she wanted—wasn’t it?
CHAPTER TEN
FOR THE FIRST few days he did not go to his office in Naples, Marco felt cut adrift from the life he
’d known since he was twenty-one. The responsibility of heading the family company, which had been entrusted to him, had dominated his waking hours for the past fourteen years, and he was the first to admit that he wasn’t good at delegating.
But he was doing it—and slowly he was starting to see the rewards.
That first afternoon when he’d joined Leah and Nicky in the pool had been strained. His son had been wary of him, reinforcing Marco’s conviction that he wasn’t a natural father. He’d felt a fool, frankly, standing in the shallow end of the pool while he tried to coax Nicky to leave Leah’s side.
‘Talk to him about what?’ he’d muttered, when she had suggested he tried to have a conversation with the little boy.
‘Tell him about the things you used to do when you were his age,’ she advised. ‘Use your imagination.’
At the time his imagination had had him visualising untying the strings of her halter-neck bikini and peeling the gold triangles of material away from her breasts. Silently cursing his out-of-control libido, he’d searched his mind for something to say to his son.
‘When I was a boy I lived in England, in that big old house where you fell in the lake.’
It hadn’t been the best start, Marco admitted, recalling how he’d scolded Nicky then. He remembered that Leah had been furious with him as she’d sprung to his son’s defence.
‘My papà used to take me out on that lake in a boat,’ he’d told Nicky.
Memories had surfaced of times when he and his father had gone fishing together. Happy memories that he’d forgotten, or maybe buried inside him when his father had died so suddenly. And Marco had realised that he had a lot to tell his son about Vincenzo De Valle—Nicky’s grandfather.
Two weeks had passed since then, and there had been a huge improvement in Marco’s relationship with Nicky. The little boy no longer shied away from him, and he seemed more relaxed when they were together—which was often.
Marco had discovered a world of train sets, toy cars and Nicky’s favourite books. Goals had been erected on the lawn so they could play football, and daily sessions in the pool meant that Nicky could now swim without water wings.
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