And nothing else mattered, she registered, a sudden chill enclosing her flesh.
‘And you did it with such panache. You told me you loved me,’ Cesare murmured in a tone so quiet that goose-bumps prickled over her exposed skin.
Mina had turned very pale. Painful chagrin was surging through her in waves. She did not want to be reminded of how naïve she had been then, swept off to bed one night and spilling out her heart like an infatuated adolescent who lacked all adult reserve.
‘And I actually believed you,’ Cesare completed with sudden rawness.
‘No doubt it gave you quite a kick,’ Mina condemned jerkily.
‘Not half as much of a kick as keeping you here for my personal entertainment will give me.’ In one unhurried movement, Cesare loosened the tie at his lean waist and shed the robe.
Mina took one staggered glance at the savage potency of his powerful sun-darkened physique and something clenched hard deep in the pit of her stomach, her skin dampening in a tide of treacherous awareness so strong that it left her weak and trembling.
She squeezed her eyes shut in rebellion, frantically fighting the raw sexual charge fingering flames of dangerous fire into an already combustible atmosphere. She would not allow him to do this to her again, she swore to herself. She would control this madness which took no account of anything but the physical, which wiped out every thought and deed. She owed that to herself.
The bed gave slightly with his weight. Mina mentally braced herself for his first touch but it didn’t come. The silence rushed and surged around her with suffocating intensity. When sh
e couldn’t stand the suspense any longer, her lashes lifted.
Cesare was lying in a careless sprawl beside her, looking up at her with eyes of shimmering gold that burned. Her breath shortened in her throat.
‘You know why I gave you that job?’ he murmured conversationally. ‘You were the best candidate and I made a conscious effort not to be sexist. I told myself that the fact that I found you attractive should not interfere with my assessment of your abilities. It was, in short my problem…but within days I sensed that my problem was developing into our problem. You wanted me too——’
‘Not that soon…no, I didn’t!’ she protested.
Cesare lifted an indolent brown hand and pressed a forefinger against her strained mouth in reproof as she automatically bent over him. ‘And you couldn’t hide it. On that level I could read you like a billboard.’
Her lips moved tremulously against his finger, a tiny little quiver of unbelievable tension shrilling through every nerve-ending. ‘No…’
‘But I fought the good fight of restraint on your behalf. I was a complete gentleman.’ A bitter curve slanted his hard mouth as he gazed up at her, electrifying golden eyes sentencing her to stillness. ‘No way was I going to take you abroad with me—too many late nights…too much intimacy…’
‘Too many other women,’ Mina filled in tightly.
‘Diversions which failed.’
‘You wanted me to resign,’ she whispered.
‘You were distracting me.’ Cesare rubbed his fingertip gently across the soft fullness of her lower lip. ‘I had incredible fantasies about you. Long before I ever touched you, I had had you a thousand times in my dreams.’
Her breath hung suspended, her cheeks hotly flushed, but she couldn’t tear her mesmerised gaze from his because he was giving her a glimpse of another world, his world, but it was an infinitely more physical one than hers had been. A spasm of pain pierced her. He talked about sex, nothing else…but then Cesare was one very sexy man.
‘Restraint started out exciting and became deeply painful,’ he muttered with feeling. ‘You bent over a desk and showed me a mere inch of thigh and I burned and I ached like a teenager craving his first score…any time, any place—it didn’t matter. The longer you stayed, the deeper I got in, the harder I had to fight, until it got to the stage where you were the only thing on my mind. It pushed me to the edge…That last week, your time was up…’
Entirely focused on him, she felt light-headed. ‘I didn’t know——’
‘Didn’t know what?’ Cesare whispered unevenly, dropping his hand to the bedspread wrapped beneath her arms as he coiled fluidly up so that their eyes locked. ‘That wanting like that is rare? That most people go all their lives without ever feeling like this? It’s a hunger so strong it has to be satisfied…and it’s bound to rage out of control.’
She recognised an incredibly sensitised awareness of her every sense. A deep languor enclosed her limbs. Silence like a pulsebeat thundered in her eardrums. Without even understanding how it had happened, she was pitched on an electrifying high of anticipation. Reason attempted to stir in the darkness of her mind as she collided dry-mouthed with eyes of molten gold but reason wasn’t powerful enough to still the mad race of her pulses or the accelerated thump of her heart as her breasts swelled and her nipples stiffened into tight little buds.
Lean fingers loosened the silken barrier, tugged it slowly down. Her breath rattled in her throat, stirring her breasts as he bared them. The knowledge that he couldn’t take his eyes off her was terrifyingly exciting. His strong face was dark, intent as he closed his hands round her forearms, pulled her down on top of him and almost simultaneously bent her back, engulfing a pouting pink nipple with the hungry heat of his mouth.
She gasped under the shock wave of sensation that tore through every nerve-ending, her fingers biting into a broad shoulder, then spearing into the dark depths of his hair, and the thought that this was not supposed to be happening came to her again. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut, a sob locking her vocal cords. Never in all her life had she ever wanted anything as badly as she wanted him at that moment. Her body greedily craved the passion but her heart craved the physical closeness, the freedom to touch, to express in silence the need and love she dared not express in words. It was like being torn in two…
One hand anchoring into her tumbling silky hair, he brought her head up. ‘Four years ago I told myself it was only chemistry, only an accidental explosion, but no other woman makes me feel like this,’ he breathed raggedly.
‘But you don’t——’ And all that she could not bring herself to say darkened her anguished eyes. You don’t love me, you don’t like me, you don’t respect me. And the awareness that she would have settled for any one of the three tortured her. ‘There has to be more,’ she muttered shakily. ‘For me, there has to be more…’
His hand moved expertly against her breast, making her tauten and jerk, live-wire sensation turning her very bones to melting honey. ‘You’ll have to do what I do…settle for what you can have; forget about the rest,’ he delivered harshly.