“Pia, if you do not like the ring, we will get you something else. I could not refuse Gio in that moment but I will absolutely understand if it does not please you. I want you to have whatever you want, cara mia.”
“No, of course I love the ring, Raphael. Nothing could make this night more glorious than it already has been.”
“Then let’s finish it with some of the calamari you like so much. With Gio visiting his sister today, I’m sure you’ve forgotten to eat.” He let his gaze settle on the upper curves of her breasts.
It was the first time Pia had worn something so silky and revealing. And it was driving him crazy.
“Because I can’t afford to lose any of the few curves I have?”
The vulnerability in her eyes snagged at him. “Because you’re now mine to protect. I wish I could show you how perfect you are to me.”
“I think I’m beginning to believe it.”
“Bene.” He inclined his head, waiting for whatever was in her head to come to her lips with bated breath, for he knew only one thing made Pia so self-conscious.
Even white teeth digging into her lower lip, she adjusted her clutch, and then looked up again. That hint of hesitation in those eyes pierced him. And made him wild with desire, for he knew what it meant. “I just want to go home.”
But he still waited. He wanted to hear those words from her mouth. He wanted her surrender. He wanted her to choose this, him. Again and again. He had a feeling that even a lifetime wouldn’t be enough. “I will take you home then.”
“No.”
Covering the distance between them, she laced her fingers with his, pressed her body to his in a side hug that sent a shudder through him. If they lived a hundred years together, he would never get used to how freely she expressed her affection. How easily and naturally it came to her to show what she was feeling. That diamond sparkling brilliantly on her finger reminded him that the generosity of her spirit was his too now. His to guard from anything that could hurt her. Including himself.
A weight unlike any responsibility he had shouldered so far in his life.
She made a moue of her mouth, and then completely negated the saucy effect by pushing her glasses up on her nose.
He chuckled.
“I don’t want to go back to the estate and I don’t want a gelato.”
“No? What are you interested in then, bella?”
A soft kiss on his cheek. Her breath fluttering over the rim of his ear. And then those warm brown eyes pinned him.
“You.” There was no coyness in her gaze. No sultry invitation. No feminine arch of her body or fluttering of her eyelashes. Just pure, artless need. “Tonight, I want you, Raphael. Just you.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
BY THE TIME she and Raphael rode the glass elevator to his ninth-floor apartment, Pia’s nerves had stretched to breaking point. Desire was a live wire left unearthed between them as they sat at the ends of the seat in the taxi, speeding through the seven or so miles to his apartment in the affluent fashion district, a world away from the busy nightlife through Corso Venezia.
Raphael’s cell phone gave that shrill ring the moment they stepped inside and Pia almost jumped out of her skin.
His hand at her lower back, Raphael steadied her. His own pithy curse when he looked at the screen painted the air blue. “I have to take this call.”
While Pia stood there in the middle of the huge lounge, her pulse ringing like a bell all through her body, Raphael returned, after only a few minutes. His mouth took on that hard cast that she didn’t like. Another darker tone added to the awareness sizzling between them.
She thought they’d grown comfortable with each other over the past few weeks, that they had crossed a milestone in their relationship, had gotten closer emotionally too.
Yet it seemed that all it took was one of them to give voice to this need between them, to express desire for sexual intimacy—she blushed when she realized that was what she had done—and every word became explosive, every look rife with promise.
“Who was that?”
He shrugged off his suit jacket, carefully folded it and left it on the chair. “Nothing important.”
Struggling to keep her dismay off her face, she said softly, “That’s what you say when you don’t want to tell me.”