‘I could take a couple of weeks off work,’ he told her softly. ‘Call my secretary and have her cancel all my engagements.’
And maybe in a way it would be best to absent himself from Sicily. Before he had left for London he h
ad told Anna to damn his name as much as it gave her satisfaction to do so. He knew that he deserved it. But Anna had shaken her smooth, dark head and looked at him with sad eyes as she told him that she would say nothing bad about him. That a man she had loved and wanted to share the rest of her life with could not have suddenly become a villain overnight.
That had been the worst part of all. He had seen her attitude change from one of bitter hurt to one of sweet generosity and an attempt at understanding and forgiving what had happened. And he had recognised in that moment just what had motivated the change. Anna didn’t want it to be over, he realised. She was telling him what she thought he wanted to hear, in the hope that he would go back to her. Tacitly, she was telling him that many, many women turned a blind eye to their men’s transgressions, and many men revelled in this and exploited it. But Giovanni had just discovered he was not one of them.
He had betrayed Anna, and in so doing, it had made him realise what was missing from his relationship. He had also betrayed the fundamental trust on which their relationship had been based. And the relationship had floundered.
And all because of the naked woman who sat before him, her smooth, high bottom resting indolently on silver satin. She had tempted him and he had succumbed. She had offered him forbidden fruit and he had eaten it. A pulse began to patter at his temple.
‘So how about I do that?’ he murmured, trying by sheer force of will to deny the heat in his loins. ‘Stay around for a couple of weeks and you can show me London.’
Two weeks! He certainly wasn’t offering her anything in the way of permanence, was he? She saw how one hard, hair-roughened thigh had come up to shield his manhood from her, but not before she had seen how aroused he had become. She thought women weren’t supposed to get turned on by that kind of thing, but Kate found that she was. Very.
‘You want me to show you London?’ she asked unsteadily.
She must know how these games were played. He doubted if she would want to hear the unvarnished truth—that he wanted to lose himself in her body for just as long as it took for the fire to leave his veins.
‘I’d love you to show me London,’ he smiled.
It was the smile that did it. The first real smile she had ever seen curve his lips into an irresistible invitation. If he smiled like that he could ask her to show him around a municipal car-park and she would have thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it.
‘I think that can be arranged.’ She smiled back at him prettily. ‘Where are you staying?’
He frowned. Again, so naïve—or was that all some kind of act? She was, he guessed, around twenty-seven, though she seemed to have honed her sexual prowess to resemble a woman in her forties.
He went for broke. ‘Usually I stay at the Granchester—unless you’re offering me a bed here, Kate?’
Then she understood what he was getting at. This was a game to be played, an erotic and exciting game. She pretended to consider it, while her heart raced. ‘It would make more sense, certainly,’ she said slowly. ‘Otherwise, I’d just have to pick you up from the hotel every morning, wouldn’t I?’
His blue eyes flashed. ‘Of course it all depends…’
‘On what?’
Another smile. A more predatory smile this time. Much more predatory. ‘On how many bedrooms you have.’
She struggled to adopt an insouciant air, even as she felt the honeyed rush of desire. ‘Just the one.’ She swallowed.
‘Oh. That decides it, then. I’ll arrange to have my bags sent over from the hotel.’ He gave a dark smile which sent shivers down her spine. ‘But let us waste no more time talking of accommodation, Kate,’ he murmured. ‘Didn’t you say something about taking a shower?’
She framed her lips to say ‘alone’, then shut them again. He was here. For two weeks. As her lover. She gave a shiver of anticipation. Why bother denying herself what she most wanted?
She rose elegantly to her feet and stared down at him, the raw look of approbation which he washed over her making her revel in her nakedness. ‘Will you wash my back for me, Giovanni?’ she questioned innocently.
Heat flooded him, and he snaked his hand around her ankle, whispered his fingertips up behind her knee to her inner thigh, and then found her where she was still as molten moist as before. Kate’s knees gave way and she sank back down to the carpet.
‘The shower?’ she said weakly and she saw the look of dark intent on his face as he reached for the packet of condoms once more.
‘Will wait,’ he growled, and began to kiss her.
CHAPTER EIGHT
KATE got her shower in the end, and so did Giovanni, because he joined her, just as he had said he would, and she found herself wondering whether this was a man who always got exactly what he wanted.
She had never had a shower like it in her life and she had never given herself so freely to a man before. It was as though she was powerless to do anything other than to react to the mastery of his body.
He slowly soaped every bit of her—indecently slowly, so that she heard herself moaning in protest beneath his touch. His fingers lingered on her breasts, and on the tiny swell of her belly, before sliding in between her thighs to bring her to a shuddering orgasm right there in the shower.