‘Cesare, let go of me!’ Mina panted in a fury, shaken to rediscover that she was absolutely powerless against that effortless strength.
‘I want you again.’ He lowered his dark head and let the tip of his tongue pierce erotically between her parted lips.
Her knees wobbled, a glow of instantaneous heat igniting treacherously inside her. Involuntarily she opened her mouth for him but he played with her, an expert erotic gamester, enforcing surrender without giving her a tithe of what she helplessly sought. The breath was trapped in her throat as the remorseless heat spread through her, making her tingle and tense, charging every nerve-ending with drowning weakness. He nibbled teasingly at her lower lip and a stifled sound of frustration escaped low in her throat.
‘I could make you beg…’ Cesare whispered thickly. ‘But I don’t think I have that much control.’
She shivered violently as he settled a powerful hand to the soft swell of her hips and crushed her against him. He was hotly aroused. The thin silk was no barrier against the throbbing heat of him. Her lower limbs turned to water. His hands brushed aside the straps on her shoulders, thrusting them down over her arms while she stood there entrapped by her own wanton susceptibility.
His breath fanning her cheek, he licked along the tremulous line of her reddened lower lip and let his fingers rise to the swelling fullness of her breasts, his thumbs glancing across the pouting tautness of her nipples. A hot damp ache stirred unbearably between her thighs and she swayed, weak in the ruthless grip of the sensations he could evoke. Her body wasn’t her own any more. He shifted sinuously against her and then closed his arms round her, lifting her up, and when he kissed her the whole world went into a tailspin and she clutched wildly at his hair, at any part of him she could reach, and kissed him back.
With a guttural groan, he brought her down on the bed, pinioning her beneath him, one hand twisted in her golden hair as he ravished her mouth over and over again until she was dizzy and breathless and utterly bemused by the extent of her own quivering, shameless excitement.
‘This time…you really are mine,’ Cesare murmured roughly, framing her hectically flushed face with hard, possessive hands as he looked down at her, eyes of molten gold alight with desire and primitive satisfaction. But those hands weren’t quite steady and that big, powerful body trembled in the circle of her arms. On a very female level, she was fully attuned to that awareness.
‘Absolutely mine,’ Cesare savoured, lowering his dark head to her breasts, circling a taut bud with the tip of his
tongue and then hungrily engulfing her achingly tender flesh with the raw heat of his mouth.
Sensation shot lightning bolts of fire through her and she lifted a hand, clenched it fiercely into the smooth skin of his shoulder. He rolled on to his side, taking her with him, and kissed her again, hotly, invasively, triumphantly, making every sense sing wildly. Desperate to touch him, she splayed her fingers against the hard wall of his chest, feeling the pull of his muscles as he tensed, instinctively following the arrowing dark furrow of hair and then hesitating fatally, passion pierced by sudden recall of her own ignorance.
‘Don’t stop now,’ Cesare groaned, his teeth nipping at the extended line of her throat, making her jerk and twist and then still in shock as he told her raggedly exactly what he wanted and carried her hand down over the fiercely contacted muscles of his taut stomach to the thrusting power of his arousal.
In the lamplight her eyes flew wide, hectic pink firing her cheeks. ‘I—I——’
Gazing down at her with a look of wonderment, Cesare suddenly threw back his dark head and loosed a husky laugh of amused understanding. ‘No, we didn’t do that before.’ He murmured something soft in Italian, raking her with slumbrous eyes as he eased her back to him. ‘So sometimes you do tell the truth, cara…’
Before she could regain the power of speech, he devoured her mouth with compelling urgency, enforcing the response that he had already learned was his to call up at will. He pushed her back against the pillows with unexpected gentleness. Reason drifted away again as though he had slammed a door shut. He ran his tongue in a glancing foray down the valley between her breasts, employing his caressing hands with devastating effect as he slid down her quivering body.
And long before she had even guessed his intention he had engaged her in something so impossibly intimate that she tautened in instinctive rejection, only to gasp and grit her teeth and find control flying out of reach within seconds. The intensity of pleasure overwhelmed her. The tormenting ache inside her expanded, the pressure built and intensified and she sobbed, raking her nails down the sheet beneath her, her hips rising in a feverish supplication as old as time. Wild need screamed through every torturously sensitised inch of her.
‘Cesare…’ she gasped helplessly on the peak of a hunger too painful to be borne.
‘Bella mia…’ With a savage groan, he plunged into her, and the wildness of pure sensation took over as he surged inside her in a driving possession, moving harder and faster with a shuddering intensity that utterly controlled. Remorselessly he took her with him to the heights of mind-blowing ecstasy. When release came in a flood of shattering sensation, it felt like flying into the sun and burning up…
Mina wakened with a frantic start when the door opened. She snatched the sheet up over her in sleepy consternation as Giulia appeared with a laden tray. ‘Buongiorno, signora.’
‘Buongiorno,’ she mumbled, stealing a glance round the unfamiliar room and the mortifyingly tossed bed. Cesare’s room…Cesare’s bed.
Giulia pulled back the curtains letting the sunlight flood in. ‘You want I run bath, signora?’
‘No, thanks.’ Even to her own ears Mina sounded a little shrill. Having staff around added a whole new dimension to embarrassment, she decided.
Wild imagery of the night before choked her on her first sip of fruit juice. It was little wonder she had slept so late. Hot pink drenched her skin as she noticed a tiny bluish bruise on one breast and became aware of the unaccustomed ache which was doubtless the reward of an orgy of lovemaking. Don’t kid yourself, she urged herself painfully. You were making love, he was having sex…
She had come into this bedroom simply to talk yet talking had bitten the dust ludicrously fast. It was all very well to complain that Cesare did not take her seriously but succumbing to his every lustful advance with mindless, breathless surrender was not exactly the intelligent approach likely to impress a rich, arrogant Sicilian tycoon. The bedroom was a battlefield with a man of Cesare Falcone’s ilk. Every time she went weak at the knees in his radius she was letting herself down!
When he had told her that he had been in love with her four years ago, all sorts of softened feelings had foolishly blossomed inside her. But loving Cesare did not mean she didn’t see his flaws. She could well imagine him getting half way to Hong Kong before it dawned on him that he might actually be in love. Having satiated himself with sex, she thought darkly, there had then been space for him to consider feelings.
But in five long days he had made no attempt to contact her. There had been no phone calls. Indeed phones which had normally rung off the hook in her office while he was away had remained defiantly silent. It was as if the world had stopped dead and on the fifth evening she had gone home to that special delivery. Dismissal and rejection combined.
Pain engulfed her. He might think he had loved her but Mina didn’t believe that what he had been feeling then was love. He had openly admitted that he had wanted her physically from the very first moment he saw her. And for three months he had fought that desire. Shamelessly candid on the subject, he had even admitted seeing other women in an attempt to satisfy that lust elsewhere.
But when that hadn’t worked he had decided to take her to bed. Neither of them had been able to ignore, suppress or control that powerful attraction and Mina was painfully convinced that what Cesare had briefly interpreted as love had merely been a fancy word for intense sexual desire. No doubt had fate allowed him more time with her, he would have got bored and appreciated that reality.
The door opened. Her hand shook so badly when she saw him that she had to put her cup of coffee back down on the tray. He strolled to the foot of the bed and smiled with raw brilliance. And that was it. He didn’t even need to open his mouth. She wanted to throw the tray at him.
‘I took down the barricades next door,’ he drawled indolently.