The large four-poster bed in the middle of the floor was draped with dusky mauve canopy and curtains while the bedspread was made from fabric in a large cabbage-rose print. The drapes matched the bedspread. The dresser and vanity table were the same dark wood as the bed but had the elegant styling of the Queen Anne era.
‘lt’s gorgeous, but so feminine.” She hadn’t expected such a thing in a houseful of bachelors.
‘Little has changed in this room since my mother’s death.”
‘This was her room?” Salvatore looked at her as if she’d gone mad.
‘of course not. Can you see a Sicilian male having separate bedrooms with his wife?”
Not one in the di Vitale family. If she ever agreed to marry Salvatore she knew the one thing they would definitely share was a bed.
‘she had it decorated for female guests and the housekeeper followed this tradition when bed coverings and such needed to be replaced.”
Without her realizing it, he had come all the way into the room and now stood not two feet from her.
She stepped back a pace. ‘1 think 1‘11 lie down before dinner. I’m wrung out.”
He reached out in a totally unexpected gesture and brushed her cheek. ‘Running from it will not make it go away.”
‘l’m not trying to make anything go away. I’m just tired.”
His hand dropped from her face. ‘lf you say so.”
She was still reliving that brief touch and the gentle accusation an hour later as she moved into yet another position hoping to get comfortable enough to sleep.
The problem was her body wanted his masculine frame curled around it. One night and a whole year of his absence from her bed was dismissed by a body that knew what it craved no matter how much she would like to deny it.
you are not asleep.”
She turned, a feeling of deep inevitability washing over her. He stood beside the bed, his hair ruffled from running his fingers through it his shirt undone partway, his eyes black with an emotion all too familiar.
‘What are you doing in here?”
‘you cannot sleep.” He set one knee on the bed.
‘Do not ask me how I know this, but I do. I cannot work thinking of you tossing and turning in your lonely bed.”
She couldn’t very well deny the tossing and turning bit. The state of the covers said all that needed to be said on that score.
‘l’m not lonely,” she denied instead.
His hand landed beside her head on the pillow and he leaned over her all sensual threatening male. ‘Are you sure?”
CHAPTER NINE
SHE couldn’t answer.
Her throat had gone dry and her lungs no longer had enough oxygen to force any words out.
His face came closer until his lips hovered less than a breath above her own.
‘1 think cara mia that you are lonely, but this should not worry you, for I know what to do about it.”
Her tongue snaked out to wet her dry lips and encountered his. She could not stop herself from taking a small taste of the masculine spice she knew to be his alone. He took it as some kind of signal and suddenly his mouth was devouring hers with carnal intensity.
His hands were everywhere. Pushing down covers. Sliding her nightgown off her. Pulling down her panties and tossing them to the floor. Tearing at his own clothes so that what buttons remained done up on his shirt popped and flew across the bed. Within seconds they were b0th gloriously naked and he had her wrapped up against him just as she had craved earlier.
‘you feel so good cfo/cezza.”