‘We shall try out the pool later,’ he said. ‘But for now...’
He turned to pour each of them a glass of softly foaming champagne. As she took hers Carla felt the faint brush of his fingers, and the glass trembled in her hand. She gazed up at him, feeling suddenly breathless.
His dark gaze poured down into hers as he lifted his glass. ‘To our time together,’ he murmured.
She lifted her glass, touching it to his. Then drank deeply from it.
As she would drink deeply from her time with this most compelling of men...
CHAPTER FOUR
THE FIRE WAS burning low in the grate. The long, heavy silk drapes were drawn across the tall windows, cocooning them in the drawing room. Cesare’s long legs extended with careless proprietorship towards the hearth from where he sat on the elegant sofa.
The evening had been long and leisurely. Champagne on the terrace, watching the sunset, followed by an exquisitely prepared dinner, discreetly served by Lorenzo in the rococo-style dining room.
Conversation had been easy—wide-ranging and eclectic—and Carla had found it both mentally stimulating and enjoyable, as it had been in the restaurant the night before. As it continued to be now, as she sat, legs slanting towards him, on a silk-covered fauteuil, sipping at a liqueur. Coffee was set on the ormolu table at her side...candles glowed on the mantel above the fire. An intimate, low-lit ambience enclosed them.
Their conversation wove on, both in English and Italian, melding Carla’s expertise on High Renaissance art with Cesare’s greater knowledge of the politics and economics of the time. And then at some point—she could not quite tell when—the conversation seemed to drain away, and she could not think of one more question to ask him.
Her liqueur was consumed, she realised, and she reached to place the empty glass on the low table at her side. As she released it Cesare stretched out his own hand. Let his fingers slide around her wrist.
It was the first physical contact between them that evening, and it electrified her.
Her eyes went to his, widening at the ripple of sensation that his long, cool fingers circling her wrist engendered. His eyes were on her, heavy and lidded.
Wordlessly, he drew her to her feet. Wordlessly, she let him. Still holding her wrist loosely, he lifted his other hand to her face. Those long, graceful fingers traced the outline of her cheek, her jaw. Faintness drummed in her veins and she felt her body sway, as if no longer able to keep itself upright.
Cesare smiled—a slow, sensual smile. As he had done in the car the night before, just before he’d kissed her. Kissed her as he did now—slowly, leisurely, with infinite sensuality, his mouth like velvet on hers...
‘How very, very beautiful you are...’ The words were a murmur, a caress. His gaze met hers. His mouth drew free. Her lips were still parted, her eyes still wide and clinging.
‘Shall we?’ he asked.
She did not answer. Did not need to.
She let him take her upstairs, into the bedroom she’d been shown to earlier, the house hushed around them. Then he was slipping the embroidered evening jacket from her, letting it fall to a chair, sliding down the zip of her dress, easing it from her shoulders. His mouth grazed the bare skin between the cusp of her arm and her neck, and she felt her head move to take in the luxury of his kiss. Slowly she stepped away from him a moment, to step out of her dress, drape it carefully on the chair.
As she turned back she saw that he had carelessly shrugged his own jacket free, and was loosening his tie, slipping the buttons of his shirt. Her eyes went to the smooth, hard wall of his chest. With an instinct older than time she stepped towards him, clad only in bra and panties, and the girdle of her stockings. She saw his eyes flare with male reaction. Felt her own fingertips reach to graze with infinite delicacy across the revealed skin of his torso. Saw his shoulders tense, his pupils become pinpoints.
Wickedly, oh-so-wickedly, she let the palms of her hands slide beneath his shirt, around the warm, strong column of his back, craning her head back to smile into his face with invitation and desire.
For one long, impossible moment he held fast, and still she smiled up at him.
Then, as if a limit had been reached, he gave a low growl in his throat and crushed her to him. His mouth came down on hers and now there was no slow, velvet arousing caress. Now there was only male hunger. Raw, insistent.
Fire flamed in her and her hands flattened on his spine, holding him against her as his mouth devoured hers. Arousal seared in her, her pulse soaring, skin heating. She felt her nipples crest, her breasts engorge—felt, with a fierce flare of arousal, his own arousal against her hips. Sensual excitement filled her...a mad headiness possessed her.
Desire, hot and tumid, took her over—took him over. Possessed them both.
He crushed her down upon the bed, upon the heavy satin covers, and the world was lost to her.
And more than just the world.
* * *
Carla twirled around her apartment, her body as light as air, her feet almost off the ground. Cesare! Oh, the very name, the very thought of him, filled her being, her mind, every synapse of her utterly possessed existence! How she thrilled to say his name, to see his face, his body—that powerful, sensual, perfect body!—in her mind’s eye all the time...
She did not need to be with him to see him. He was there in her head, a constant presence, and every beat of her pulse was telling her what he had done to her.