One Night in... Milan: The Italian's Future Bride / The Italian's Chosen Wife / The Italian's Captive Virgin. Кейт Хьюит
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a reluctance to let his mood soften, he pushed himself away from the door and walked towards her. She heard him coming and stiffened her spine. When he leant down with the intention of picking up her glass to offer it to her, she actually shuddered.
‘Please don’t start dragging me around again,’ she choked out.
Was that what he had been doing—?
Yes, that was what he had been doing, Raffaelle realised, and straightened up with a jerk. ‘I’m—sorry,’ he said.
‘Everyone is sorry.’ She laughed tensely. ‘Doesn’t help much though, does it?’
He couldn’t argue with that so he threw himself down on the sofa beside her and released another sigh. ‘Beginning to feel more like the real victim now, cara?’ He could not seem to stop the taunts from coming. ‘It is a strange feeling, don’t you think—being kind of frustratingly helpless? If we then start to wonder how our present lovers are going to feel when the news hits the stands, the sense of frustration really begins to bite.’
‘You have a lover?’ Her chin shot up, her slender neck twisting to show him blue eyes stark with horror and the glittering evidence of held-in tears. His inner senses shifted, stirring awake from what had only been a very light slumber anyway.
‘Do you?’ he fed back.
‘Of course not!’ she snapped. ‘Do you really think I would have got involved in any of this if I had a lover who could be embarrassed by it?’
‘Whereas I was not allowed to make that choice,’ he pointed out. ‘So stop feeling sorry for yourself,’ he finished coolly. ‘You are still less the victim here than I am, so—’
‘And you are just so loving being able to keep saying that to me!’ Rachel got to her feet, restless, tense without knowing why.
Then she did know and she turned on him. ‘So who is she—?’ she speared at him as if she had the right to ask such a question.
Which she didn’t, as the mocking glint in his eyes told her.
But it did not stop her stupid brain from conjuring up some other leggy blonde creature with a very expensive pedigree draping herself over him while he lounged in much the same way he was now—all long limbs and tight muscles and rampant sex appeal waiting to be adored because it was his due.
She took in a short breath, despising the heat of jealousy she could feel burning in her chest, as if a few angry kisses and a sham announcement had given her exclusive rights of possession over him!
It did not, but nor did it stop her crazy imagination from imprinting her own image of him. Her heart began pounding out a suffocating rhythm. This time she couldn’t even look away! And to make it so much worse, having been crushed against him more times than was decent, she could even smell his sexy scent in her nostrils, feel the warmth of his mouth and the possessive touch of his hands on her—
‘There is no one—fortunately …’
His deep voice slunk into her brain but she had to blink to make herself hear the words he’d spoken—then blink again to make herself understand what they meant.
He meant that there was no other lover in his life right now. Her mouth fell dry and her legs went hollow.
‘I was just curious as to whether you had a man hanging about in the wings of this charade, ready to jump out and cause me more trouble.’
‘Well, there isn’t,’ she confirmed and spun away, hating to hear him make that sardonic denunciation of her character because she knew he had every right to suspect her of every underhand trick there was going.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘So I can sit here and enjoy looking at my newly betrothed’s fabulous legs without worrying if I am encroaching on someone else’s territory.’
The aforementioned legs tingled. She moved tensely. ‘We are not betrothed—’
‘And the way the neat shape of her derrière is teasing me as it moves inside that tight little dress … ‘
Rachel swung round. ‘Is this your idea of having fun, just to get your own back on me?’
‘With compliments?’ he quizzed innocently.
‘Those are not compliments!’
‘You don’t like me to tell you that I like what I see—?’
‘No—!’ she lashed out.
‘But it’s okay for you to look me over as if you cannot believe your good fortune, is it?’
Rachel froze as a guilty blush ran right up her body and into her face. ‘I w-was not—’
‘Are your breasts your own?’ he cut in on her insolently.
Her mouth dropped open in complete disbelief that he had actually voiced that question. ‘How dare you ask me that?’ she seethed.
‘Easily,’ he replied cynically. ‘They look real, but who can tell by just looking these days—’
‘They are real!’ she choked out. ‘And I’ve had enough of this—’
‘No, you haven’t.’
With only that small hint that something was coming, he sat forward and snaked an arm around her waist, then tumbled her down on to his lap.
Her cry of alarm doubled as a shimmering gasp when she found herself contained inside all of that long-limbed, hard-muscled strength.
‘W-what do you think you’re doing?’ Her clenched fists pushed at his shoulders.
The gleam in his eyes mocked her. ‘The way you keep looking at me, count yourself lucky that I lasted as long as I did.’
Oh, God, she’d been that obvious? ‘You said y-you wouldn’t do this—!’
‘You are no longer helpless.’
He caught hold of her chin and pushed it upwards, his eyes hiding beneath half-lowered eyelashes as he waited for her lips to part with her next cry of protest—then he pounced, dipping his dark head to match the full pink quivering shape of her mouth with his.
So they’d kissed in anger. They’d kissed in a terrifying state of untrammelled lust. They’d kissed to shock and to subdue. But this—this was different. This contained so much hungry, frustrated, heated desire that it stirred her up more turbulently than any kiss she’d experienced in her entire life.
He explored her mouth so deeply that the feeling of being taken over completely drained her of the will to fight. Her clenched fists stopped pushing and opened to begin stroking in tight, tense, restless movements that only stopped when she found the warmly scented skin at his nape.
One of his arms held her clamped against him, the other stroked the length of her silk-covered thigh. Her dress had rucked up and the higher his hand glided the more she had to brace her inner thighs to try to contain what was happening there. And her breasts were tight, the nipples two stinging pinpricks pressing against the solid wall of his chest through his shirt.
Her fingers became restless again, one set moving to his satin cheekbone, then down in a delicate tremor to the corners of their straining mouths. He muttered something as he caught hold of her fingers and fed them down between them, until she was covering the hard ridge of aroused flesh pushing at his trousers. Frenzy arrived, a hot feverish frenzy of mutual desire that had been bubbling beneath the surface ever since their first kiss. Now it quickly spiralled out of control.
He caught hold of her hair and pulled her head back, his mouth deserting hers to wreak a trail of hot kisses down the arching stretch of her throat.
She was writhing with excitement, her skin alive to every brush of his lips and flickering lick of his tongue. A simple tug and the strap holding up her dress slipped off her shoulder. As clear air hit the thrust of her breast