‘But I want——’
‘This…this is what you want!’ Without warning, he took her mouth in a raw surge of dominating passion and the world blacked out, plunging her into the hot darkness beckoning behind her lowered eyelids.
His tongue plunged between her lips, seeking out the tender interior beyond, and she trembled violently as he forced her closer, deftly parting her thighs so that she knelt astride him. A gasp of shock escaped her at the sudden crashing intimacy of her position and she stiffened but, with an unashamed groan of intense satisfaction, Cesare prevented her retreat, powerful hands curving to the swell of her hips as he ravished her mouth with an urgent hunger then ripped away the last lingering remnant of her control.
With one kiss, he made her burn hotter than hellfire. It was like being consumed. Her swollen breasts were crushed against him, the hair roughening his broad chest abrading her sensitive nipples. Every part of her was connected to the hot, hard heat of him, and when he moved, letting her feel the thrusting readiness of his manhood against the very heart of her, she moaned with excitement, so far beyond control that he was the only stable entity she could cling to.
‘This is what we have,’ Cesare muttered thickly, holding her steady with long fingers knotted into her hair, tugging her head back so that he could look at her face. ‘Don’t tell me it’s not enough. Dio…three weeks without touching you! I punish you, I punish myself. Does that please you?’
‘No…’ she mumbled, drowning in his smouldering golden eyes.
He leant over her, nibbled erotically at the reddened fullness of her lower lip, and as she trembled, he uttered a strangled groan and shuddered, every muscle tautening with whipcord tension as he lifted her against him, searching out the moist heat between her thighs. She writhed, cried out, unbearable sensation rising to a sudden shattering peak that was pure torment.
‘I can’t wait.’ He brought her down to him with aching slowness and agonising control, forging his entry little by little, and it was so staggeringly exciting that she somehow wanted to faint with delight and scream with frustration at the same time. She closed her eyes, instinctively attempting to conceal the wildness of her own desperate hunger.
‘Look at me,’ Cesare demanded, stilling.
‘Don’t stop!’ she gasped between clenched teeth.
‘Open your eyes,’ he grated. Her lashes flew up, revealing her puzzlement.
‘I want to watch you…I want to be sure you know it’s me inside you,’ he rasped with sizzling bite, his lean features taut with intense sexual arousal and equally intense determination.
She was far beyond reasoning. Quivering with out-of-control response to what he was making her feel, she looked blankly back at him. ‘Cesare…?’
‘Sí…Cesare…nobody else…ever again,’ he spelt out between gritted teeth, perspiration dampening his golden skin. And with riveting abruptness he withdrew from he
r and flipped her backwards across the tumbled bedspread, coming down on top of her in one fluid movement, pinning her startled hands to the mattress and thrusting into her yielding flesh with driving force. Later she would remember it as the most intensely erotic shock he had ever given her. She was stunned and then stunned again by a wave of sheer blinding excitement.
He took her by storm and she felt possessed, driven, inflamed by the feeling that he was out of control. All honeyed pliancy and complicity, every fibre of her body pitched to an unbelievable height of anticipation, she let herself go, lost herself entirely in the thunder of her own crazed heartbeat and the fevered tension coiling ever tighter inside her. With every driving thrust he took her higher, and then suddenly the whole world went multi-coloured, her back arching, her teeth clenching as she sobbed, ‘I love you…I love you!’ on the peak of a shuddering and ecstatic wave of drowning pleasure.
Clawing back up through the layers of indolent languor which enclosed her, Mina noticed the silence first. It vibrated. Cesare freed himself from the tangle of their damp limbs and slid on to his side, releasing her from his weight, letting cooler air wash over her hot skin.
‘Don’t feed me bull like that again,’ he murmured with lancing derision.
With an uncertain hand she reached for the bedspread but it was too tangled to offer her any speedy hope of a covering. Hearing that tone from him in the aftermath of his passion was like having a knife plunged into her heart. It made her want to curl up and die. It negated the pleasure and, worse, it made her wanton craving of that same pleasure seem a shameful and weak self-betrayal.
‘What are you talking about?’ she muttered, because she really didn’t know.
‘Hearing you tell me that you love me has to be the biggest turn-off I know,’ Cesare imparted with chilling emphasis.
She turned away from him, gripped by sudden comprehension, slaughtered by rejection. Only now did she recall what she had said at that blinding instant of climax when her body and her mind had been in passion’s grip.
‘But then maybe you said it out of habit,’ Cesare suggested with contempt.
‘Habit?’ she queried tremulously, astounded to hear her own voice.
‘Maybe Clayton likes the illusion…I don’t. I don’t have any illusions left about you and when you don’t have expectations you don’t get disappointed,’ he asserted with a harsh laugh. ‘And he must have been very disappointed today when he finally had to face that your “love” goes to the highest bidder!’
Mina understood then and her stomach heaved. Her hands clenched, her fingernails scoring sharp crescents into the soft skin of her palms. Then, without any warning at all, the anger came, surging up out of the devastating pain of her emotions and taking over…
CHAPTER EIGHT
IN ONE wrathful movement Mina sat up, her delicate facial bones stiff, her amethyst eyes brilliant with rage. ‘I’ve had enough of this…I won’t listen to one more filthy insinuation!’ she told him furiously. ‘Maybe you’d like to tell me how Steve and I could possibly have carried on some sleazy affair with Roger and Winona looking on? You’re talking about four people who have known each other all their lives—and if you sneeze Winona notices!’
Cesare had tautened in astonishment, deep-set dark eyes fixed intently to her. His sensual mouth took on an unexpected quirk of amusement. ‘I can believe that——’
But not the rest of it?’ Mina cut in rawly. ‘Why do you think Steve hates you so much? Steve and I dated for four years and we were never intimate, never even partially intimate! But I only knew you for three months and he actually dared to tell me once that that was the hardest thing of all for him to accept…and I thought at the time, To hell with fragile male egos—and I still think it!’