‘No, I couldn’t.’ He silenced her with a quick kiss. ‘I’m not sneaking around like some horny teenager. I want you in my bed at night.’ He gave his eyebrows a saucy lift. ‘And in the morning—and any other time in between that takes our fancy. We’ve got another week and a half here and I plan to have you as much as is humanly possible. If you don’t want me, all you have to do is say so.’
‘I do want you,’ she said. ‘You know I do.’
But did she want him too much?
They only had a week and a half, and she had to keep sight of that. She mustn’t let her romantic nature and her affection for him—not to mention their thrilling sexual chemistry—get in the way of her common sense.
But she could take that risk, she decided. She was ready—and she was through being a coward about her own needs and desires.
‘Well, good.’ His smile turned to a triumphant grin. He grasped her waist and tumbled her back onto the bed. ‘But you’d better get dressed pronto,’ he added. She shrieked, giddy with excitement, as he wrestled the sheet off to nuzzle her exposed nipple.
‘Or I’m going to make you prove it.’
And then he did.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
‘THERE you are. What are you hiding in here for?’
Eva looked up from the exquisite parchment that had the Alegria family tree hand-drawn on it by fourteenth-century monks, to see Nick striding into the palazzo’s library with a frown on his face and a picnic basket under his arm.
‘Studying your ancestors,’ she replied, acknowledging the flutter of excitement that always gripped her when she saw him again.
‘Don’t start. I’ve already had a lecture about my so-called ancestors from Don Vincenzo today,’ he said, but to her joy he sounded exasperated rather than upset.
It had been over a week since she’d eavesdropped on his lunch with Don Vincenzo—and since then she’d enjoyed watching his relationship with his grandfather soften and grow. She knew Nick was still opposed to inheriting the palazzo, but Don Vincenzo had proved to be patient and kind and surprisingly astute—and he’d worn down Nick’s resistance to him on every other front. The two men had a lot in common, despite Nick’s attempts to dwell on their differences, and it had been sweet to see him struggling to cope with his growing affection for the old man. She wondered if he knew he was making an attachment here he would find it hard to break.
‘I thought you had a whole day of meetings with Don Vincenzo’s lawyers in Milan?’ she said, inordinately pleased to see him back so soon.
‘Not any more.’ Grabbing her wrist, he hauled her out of the chair. ‘I gave them the slip,’ he said, dragging her out of the room and down the corridor. ‘We’re playing hooky for the rest of the day.’
‘We are?’ she asked, excitement making her voice rise.
He squeezed her hand and grinned. ‘Yeah, we are.’ He lifted the wicket basket. ‘And I’ve bought supplies so we don’t have to come back till we start to starve.’
She giggled, like a child escaping from the classroom, as he led her out of the palazzo’s back door, then climbed the steeply terraced ornamental gardens towards an overgrown orchard of lemon trees. As they trekked down the country lane through the trees Eva struggled to keep pace with his long strides and control the ecstatic flutter of her heartbeat at the promise of a new adventure.
She’d become addicted to the adrenaline rush of being Nick Delisantro’s lover. Their time together had rushed past in a haze of hot passion-filled nights and long lazy days as they explored Lake Garda and its surrounding towns and villages—and every inch of each other’s bodies. He never ceased to surprise her, to arouse her, to provoke and excite her—and she’d found herself conquering every challenge and rejoicing in every risk.
In fact, she was a little bit afraid she might have become as wild as he was. But she couldn’t seem to find the will to worry about it too much. And if there were moments when she held him a little too tightly, when she had to bite back the urge to ask him to confide more about himself and the demons that she knew still haunted him, or wondered about how she was going to cope back in her old life when their time was up, she refused to dwell on them. This was a once-in-a-lifetime adventure that had already changed her for ever. She’d become so much bolder, so much more independent and she was loving the new, improved, devil-may-care Eva Redmond far too much to force her back into her shell even when her dangerous lover was no longer by her side to tempt her into trouble.
And she didn’t need to know about Nick’s past, because she’d already come to terms with the fact that they had no future together. There were only two days left until he returned to San Francisco and she went back to London. And while neither of them had mentioned it, they both knew it was coming.
Eventually they reached a sloping meadow, a good mile above the palazzo, edged by ancient trees, and
carpeted with wild flowers. She toed off her sandals and let her bare toes sink into the course grass and fragrant blooms. A light breeze tempered the scorching heat of the summer sun.
Dumping the basket on the ground, Nick flopped down on his back beside it. ‘We’re stopping here,’ he said, hooking his hands behind his head. ‘That thing weighs a bloody ton.’
Eva laughed. ‘Fine by me, Romeo,’ she teased.
‘Hey, don’t get cocky. I wheedled lunch out of Maria, didn’t I?’ he grumbled, mentioning the palazzo’s chef, just one of the many members of staff who Eva knew adored him—so she doubted much wheedling had been involved. ‘And hefted it all the way up here,’ he finished.
‘Fair enough.’ She grinned, kneeling next to him to open the basket. ‘I’ll carry it back.’
‘Big deal,’ he said, lifting up on an elbow to pluck out a chilled bottle of Pinot Grigio, while Eva laid out the checkered cloth Maria had packed. ‘It’ll be empty by then.’
She snorted out an unladylike laugh at the disgruntled expression on his face as she laid out the array of mouth-watering anti-pasti dishes.