‘Dio,’ he breathed as enlightenment hit. ‘You provoking little witch, you knew this was coming!’
‘Homework.’ She grinned, because she was wearing the red lace underwear he had bought her.
He started towards her with his fingers already at his shirt buttons and his eyes promising revenge.
But she even took control of this. ‘No, I want to do that,’ she said, and knocked his hands away to replace them with her own…
It was easy to stand here and let her undress him. It was, in fact, the easiest thing in the world for him to lose himself in the pleasurable touch of this beautiful woman as she kissed and stroked his shirt from his body, leaving him to enjoy the gentle quiver of white flesh cupped in provocative red lace as she worked her way down his torso.
He didn’t touch her; he didn’t attempt to help. He just stood there feeling the blood of life begin to pump the fire of passion into him as she dropped to her knees to remove his shoes and socks before reaching up to tackle his trousers.
This was what he wanted, he told himself. In fact he needed this display of sensual worship to help soothe his vulnerable ego. As he stared down at her golden head with its hot copper lights, and watched her slender white fingers efficiently strip away the rest of his clothes, he heard himself murmur lazily, ‘Be gentle with me, cara.’ Because in this game he knew exactly where he stood with her.
High on the plinth of passionate lovers—if there were such a thing.
‘Why?’ she questioned, looking perfectly cool as she ran her eyes over what she’d exposed. ‘Nothing I see here looks that fragile.’
And to prove her claim she closed her fingers around him. The air was sucked into his lungs on a shuddering gasp that forced his eyes closed on a shaft of fierce inner response, and for a long moment he just hovered there, waiting, wanting, knowing what was coming—
Then, ‘No,’ he rasped on a rough-toned denial, and was suddenly pulling her to her feet so he could close his arms around her.
‘Why not?’ she wanted to know, and he understood her confusion, because he didn’t usually stop her when she was in this kind of mood.
But he had suddenly discovered that he needed to be the one in control here. It was the only way he was going to cope with the lowering knowledge that somewhere, somehow he had become this woman’s sex slave.
If anyone had told him two weeks ago that he, Giancarlo Cardinale, would one day find himself in this invidious position, he’d have laughed in their face!
The next few hours drifted by utilising the best remedy he knew for easing stress. It made for a long and languorous lunch-break. With bodies entwined they built the magic, with touch and taste and sensual caresses that helped cocoon them once again in the warm, moist-honeyed sweetness, which culminated in her lying beneath him. Limbs wrapped with limbs, and with him moving deep inside her, with his eyes and his mouth and the gentle touch of his hands, he made a different kind of love to her.
It was a small piece of heaven.
The same remedy came into play again late that same evening. And another day went by, and another, until nothing was easing his stress levels—because she still wasn’t telling him anything he needed to know.
Unable to stand it any longer, he took a different kind of evasive action.
‘Go and get dressed up,’ he said one evening. ‘We are eating somewhere special tonight…’
There was nothing that unusual in them eating out—they ate out quite frequently, in fact. So what felt different about this evening? she asked herself while her fingers scrambled through her jewellery case in search of her watch, which she had mislaid somewhere.
A sign of distraction in anyone’s book, she mused, feeling Giancarlo’s eyes lazily watching her as he lounged on the bed, dressed and ready to go and just waiting for her to finish getting ready.
It was what he was wearing that was making tonight different, she admitted. The black dinner suit and bow-tie turned him into a different person—a hard, sharp, breath-catchingly sophisticated person she felt very much out of her depth with.
‘Have you seen my watch?’ she asked, trying to sound perfectly normal when in actual fact she was feeling quite strange beneath the wrap she had tied loosely round her.
‘What does this look like?’ he murmured teasingly, reaching into the case to slide a slender wrist-watch out from beneath a thin red silk handkerchief it had been hiding beneath.
‘Oh…’ she gasped…
The strangled little sound sharpened his interest, sending his lazy gaze off to check what it was he was holding casually between finger and thumb—and felt himself floundering on the rocks of a mind-sizzling fury.
‘It—it’s very old,’ she told him shakily, trying for a dry little laugh that didn’t quite make it. ‘It doesn’t even work. It-it’s an heirloom of m-my great-grandmother’s.’
‘Your great-grandmother?’ he repeated, waiting with gritted teeth for her confirming nod. It came, and his inner anger soared to a place it had never visited before.
For he knew this watch. He had even been allowed to handle it very carefully once when Edward had shown it to him years ago—and explained to him that the delicately worked, enamelled diamond-set cabochon wrist-watch had belonged to Edward’s grandmother! It was the only thing of value she had managed to bring with her to England after the fall of Imperial Russia.
And it was a genuine Fabergé, unique and priceless. ‘For my first-born great-granddaughter,’ she had instructed her grandson.