She jiggled. Everything jiggled.
He found himself scanning the area for perverts even as he advanced on her, not entirely sure what his purpose was at this point.
He’d come back for her with the bike, only to spend the last half hour tracking her down. Naturally she’d come back into the garden and wound up at the foundry, but instead of finding a contrite woman he discovered a wood nymph.
She must have heard his tread, but she ignored him and ran more water over the back of her neck, then cupped her hands and brought some into her mouth.
It was too much. He reached down and cut off the flow with an aggressive snap.
‘Hey!’ she coughed.
He shoved her shirt at her. ‘Cover yourself up.’
She turned around and his gaze instantly dropped to her breasts, to the gleaming, glistening rivulets of water running down those slopes in a race to see which was going to soak the white cotton bra first.
He recognised that she was saying something but it got lost in the roar of testosterone currently running at full throttle through him—the kind of overload that made a man say, do, be anything required to stay perfectly still, beholding something designed to turn him into a blithering idiot.
His gaze dropped a little further to the revelation of how her ribs narrowed to a beautifully indented waist, and below her hips flared out almost outrageously. The ugly trousers had lost their top button and hung from the widest point of her hips, revealing her navel and a masterpiece of a soft female belly. Like most men, he really wasn’t enamoured of a flat female stomach, and his fingers flexed as he resisted the temptation to touch her there, to stroke her, to test the softness, before his hand moved lower...
He distinctly heard her say, ‘Get a grip, Benedetti.’
His attention bounced back to her breasts. The bra was definitely opaque now. Strawberry pink nipples were visible.
Astounded by his lack of self-control, he snarled at her, ‘Put the shirt on—Dio!’
When she just stood there, blinking like a rabbit in a gun’s sights, he took hold of one of her hands and began pushing it through an armhole.
She jerked away from him and hurriedly pulled the shirt over her shoulders, turning her back on him.
He took a couple of steps back, struck by the way he was behaving. Like a madman.
So what if she was standing around in her underwear? He’d had girlfriends in the past who didn’t seem to possess a bikini top, who paraded around poolside, and frankly he couldn’t have cared less.
Why had he complicated something so utterly simple with this farce? He should never have brought her here. He should have withstood his desire to have her to himself and kept to his plan to take her to Ragusa. Instead he now had her halfway up a mountain with very limited options for getting her down. He should be focussing on those logistics, not on this overwhelming need to corral her. He would explain to her about traditional attitudes and the need to respect them. She would keep herself buttoned up. She would behave, in truth, like the twenty-year-old Sicilian virgin his mother would prefer him to marry. Only then could he relax.
He watched Ava fighting her way into her shirt, muttering something about him being a prude, all the while trying to cover herself up. Her head was bent and he could see the soft kiss curls made by her hair at the base of her neck, at odds with her unforgiving clothes.
Tenderness unexpectedly backhanded him.
* * *
When Ava had heard him coming her heart leapt because he’d actually come looking for her. But her first instinct—to be modest, to cover herself up—she had thrown aside.
After all, stab-your-heart-out-blondes didn’t have a problem with advertising their wares.
Oh, she’d known she was playing with fire, but deep down an entirely feminine part of her psyche had wanted a little payback.
Sexually frustrated, was she? Well, two could play at that game.
But he’d looked at her as if he was made of stone.
She’d thought her breasts looked pretty good in this bra. Not perky—you couldn’t be her size and shoot for the moon...although given this man had had close personal contact with some spectacularly beautiful women he was probably used to the stay-up-on-their-own-thanks-to-a-surgeon variety.
Ava shut down on that line of thought. It didn’t help.
‘The people here are conservative,’ he imparted roughly. ‘This isn’t your Bondi Beach, with its topless women, and nor is it Positano. This is part of a small mountain village. Show some respect.’
Still feeling beleaguered by all those gorgeous women with more noteworthy breasts he had access to—no doubt he didn’t yell at them and do his best to cover them up—Ava lost her temper.
‘Respect?’ she muttered, fumbling with the buttons. ‘Why don’t you start showing me some respect? This whole mess is all your fault to begin with. You’re the one who wanted to take the scenic tour of Italy...’