HE WAS right. Freya went hot all over. Enrico got his Christian name from his paternal grandfather, Alessandro from his maternal one. Valentino had been the name of his late father. Nicolo was exclusive to Enrico himself.
‘Nicolas,’ she corrected.
‘In defiance,’ he nodded. ‘You are a hard woman, Freya Jenson, with a hard heart and a taste for vendetta. But when it came right down to it you could not stop yourself from naming our child for his father.’
What did she say? Did she give in now? Did she swallow her anger and bitterness and pride and give this man who’d let her down so badly the triumph over her he was waiting for?
‘If you want me to say it out loud then I won’t—ever.’ Because even now, with all his threats laid out in front of her, she still could not give him that much.
‘Although it is the truth? He is my son?’
Lips pinned tightly together, she said nothing.
‘Rumour has it that Luca is so vain in the bedroom, he can only perform if there is a mirror in which he can see himself,’ Enrico’s hateful voice resonated on. ‘There was no such mirror in our bedroom, cara, so the chances are that he could not have kept it up long enough to have been any good at the seed-sowing stuff. Unless you held a hand mirror over your face while he did it, of course.’
Freya hit him. She did not know where the impulse had come from, or why it had taken that particular nasty taunt to make her react the way she did, but the next thing she knew her fingers were leaving red score marks on his hard, handsome cheek.
‘S-sorry,’ she heard herself stammer. ‘But you—’
Too late once again. The black eyes flared up with rage and his hands snaked out. Next thing, he’d hauled her back against him. His mouth this time was hard and cruel. In the few seconds it took between her slap, his flare of rage and their kiss, Freya had run the gauntlet of shock, dismay, then fear and arrived at passion, which was unleashed from its restraints and hell-bent on devouring both of them. There was no sensual patience now, but the full onslaught of a grinding mouth-to-mouth possession that made her jaw ache and her lips burn with its heat.
She wriggled and squirmed and grabbed at his hair to pull his head away but it didn’t stop anything, in fact, it only made things worse. He deepened the kiss and hot need flooded her. Her tugging fingers curled then clung. It was like giving the green light to an orgy of the senses. Anger fed it, aided by the stinging echo of the slap. They’d had fights before which had ended up wallowing in hot, seething passion—but never, ever anything as hot and seething as this.
It was almost as if her brain had shut off—but it hadn’t. She was aware of everything, knew what she was doing was wrong…stupid! But he felt and sounded and tasted so good! All man-out-of-control and fast, breathtaking hunger. She fed him and urged him on. Her jacket was wrenched from her arms and her shoulders. It landed somewhere in a limp grey heap. Her bra went next and he did not release her mouth even as his own jacket was raked off his back and flung aside.
A new kind of heat trammelled up inside her, the kind that set her gasping as she wrenched free the rest of his shirt buttons while he pushed up her skirt to close his hands round her thighs. The slide of those knowing fingers from lace-top hold-ups to lacy panties made her gasp and quiver. When he found what he was hunting for, the finger he ran along the groove of stretched fabric between her legs set fine, receptive tissue unfurling in helpless, pulsating arousal, and the way that finger trembled as he hooked the fabric out of his way only made her gasp and quiver again.
It had been the memory of the warm, slick, knowing stroke of his finger that had awoken her in the middle of the night, aching and throbbing with need, only to find herself alone in her bed. It had been the pleasure-giving feel of that finger sliding inside her that she’d yearned for so badly in those lonely moments, and the only way to relieve the agony had been to curl into a tight ball and sob her heart out.
Now it was here. It was real and she’d never felt so desperate.
‘You’re hot for me,’ he rasped out, though his voice shook as he said it.
Tugging her mouth free, she opened her eyes and found herself looking into two deep, dark pits of angry derision that were spiked by pure, untamed, passionate want.
‘Do I stop?’ he demanded.
Her reply was a shrill little whimper.
‘Do I—?’ he raked at her.
‘No!’ she sobbed out.
Fire lit those dark, deriding eyes with triumph. She heard the scrape of a zip and her sexual temperature went soaring. When he lifted her up to straddle him with her knees pressed into the desk either side of his hips, she arched her lower body into him and clung. The heated clash of skin against skin made her wild and wanting. By now his head was drawn back on his neck, her fingers buried in his hair to hold him there while she helped him maintain their hot-tongued, deep, deep kiss. Then, with a single hard move, he used his hands on her hips to position her above him and draw her down onto the long, hard length of his waiting shaft.
It was like sheathing himself in satin fire. Enrico had to close his eyes on a shuddering groan as pure pleasure flooded through him in a heated rush. When he opened his eyes again, her pointed breasts taunted his tongue and he shifted his hands to support her back so she could arch further and give him access.
They’d made love in some outlandish places. They’d fallen on each other like wild animals often enough. But never like this before, in his office, in broad daylight, on a desk, with their clothes half off and their bodies driven by the concentrated power of driving, angry, deep-thrusting lust.
Deserting her breasts, he went for her mouth again, greedy for everything at once. He despised her, but he had never felt more alive than he was feeling at this moment. The power of it drenched him in the burning heat of sensual excess. She was the one causing the mayhem, her slender hips moving up and down on him and rotating in the way he had taught her in order to enhance their every pleasure.
She was amazing at it. He lifted his mouth away from hers to look at her. Her eyes were so dark now, the green in them was lost. He h
eld her gaze. It was part of the excitement to have their eyes and bodies locked, as her hands clung to his hair. Her own hair hung like a crackling curtain that cloaked both of them while his long fingers moulded her slender, tight-skinned hips as she rode him, greedily taking every bit of him in her sliding, taut-muscled, sensuous sheath.
‘Coming, amore?’ he husked as he felt her first telling ripples take hold of him. ‘Want to fly with your lover?’
‘Yes,’ she gasped.