CHAPTER SIX

      KATHRYN TOLD HERSELF it was a dream.

      The moonlight. This man.

      It was a dream, that was all, and so it didn’t matter if she simply opened to him. If she let him sweep her up his bare chest, cool to the touch but still so hard, like steel. If she made no sign of protest.

      If all she did was kiss him back as hungrily and greedily as if she’d been the one to go to him.

      And everything was heat. Fire. Need and longing made real in the silvery night.

      His hands were big and hard, slipping from her hair to cradle her face, holding her where he wanted her.

      And he plundered her mouth, using his lips and his teeth and that clever tongue of his, angling his jaw to take the kiss deeper, wilder.

      She felt dizzy again—unmoored and lost—and was only dimly aware that he’d hauled her off the ground and up into his arms. She didn’t care. It was a dream, so what did it matter if he was carrying her somewhere, his mouth still fused to hers? He was tall and so very strong, and the feel of him surrounding her made her shake and quiver deep inside.

      He walked back through her door and straight to her bed, laying her across the piled-high linens and following her down into the clutch of all that softness, and it was...astonishing. There was no other word for the press of him against her, so male and darkly perfect, so hard and Luca. There was no other way to describe that absurdly sculpted body rubbing all over hers.

      Making her feel new. Like a strange creature, red-hot and molten, taking over the body she’d thought until this moment she knew so well.

      This is only a dream, she told herself, and so she indulged herself.

      He stroked his way deep into her mouth, tasting her deeply, and she met him. She ran her fingers through that thick dark hair of his, crisp and warm to her touch. She traced the magnificent line of his wide, muscled back down to his narrow hips, then worked her way back up those ridges on his abdomen that she could admit, here in this dream where nothing counted, fascinated her to the point of distraction.

      Beyond that point, perhaps.

      He tore his mouth from hers even as his hands moved. He propped himself up on one forearm and smoothed his other hand over her cashmere top, pausing at the top and then tugging—and it was a measure of how dazed she was that she didn’t comprehend what he was doing until he’d unzipped her and the cool air teased over her bare breasts.

      And she was panting as if she was running. As if she’d been running for miles.

      Luca muttered something in Italian that washed over her like a caress, and then he bent his head and took one nipple she hadn’t realized had pebbled into a hard point deep into his mouth.

      Kathryn heard a noise that could not possibly have been her, so high-pitched and keening, bouncing back from the canopy above them, the ornate ceiling. She felt the dark current of his laughter shake through him and into her, making his shoulders move beneath her hands and shudder against her breasts. The sheer physicality of that stunned her, and then he simply sucked on her, that rich tugging setting off an explosion inside her. It seared its way through her, like a lightning bolt from his mouth straight down the center of her body to kick between her legs.

      Hard and something like beautiful, all at once.

      And Kathryn didn’t know what to do. There was too much of him, everywhere. All over her, pressing her down with him into the embrace of her soft, soft mattress, making her wish this mad dream could go on and on forever.

      He made a low, greedy sound that she recognized somehow, in a deep feminine place inside her she’d never known was there, and thrilled to at once. She dug her hands in his hair, but not to guide him—only to anchor herself as he smoothed his wicked palm down over her exposed belly, pausing to test the indentation of her navel, then dipping even lower to slip beneath the waistband of her soft trousers.

      Kathryn opened her mouth to speak, to say something—to do something—

      But Luca knew exactly what he was about. He didn’t pause. He simply slid his hand down, so hot and hard, and then held the core of her, molten and hot and swollen with need, in his palm.

      She made a noise, and he laughed again. He used the faint edge of his teeth against her nipple and made that lightning bolt roar through her again, wider and hotter and far more dangerous, and then he ground the heel of his hand against the place she ached most.

      And Kathryn disappeared. She went up in a column of flame that tore her apart. She lost herself, shattering into too many pieces to count. She shook and she shook, bucking against him and unable to stop or hold on or do anything but survive the explosion—and when she finally came back to earth it was with a giant thud and a heartbeat so hard against her ribs that it hurt.

      It hurt.

      There was no pretending that was a dream.

      Luca’s hand was still down her trousers, tracing lazy patterns in her wet heat, and he’d propped himself up next to her while he did it. Watching her. Learning her. And Kathryn found she couldn’t quite breathe. Something he made that much worse when he shifted from watching his own hand play with her, letting his gaze slam into hers.

      His eyes were dark. So very dark. There was something powerful and supremely knowing in the way he looked at her then, and she shuddered again, as if she couldn’t keep herself from falling apart. As if now he needed only to look at her to make her crack wide-open.

      “Luca...” But she didn’t sound like herself. She didn’t recognize that small, profoundly needy voice that came out of her own mouth.

      And she had no idea what to say.

      He murmured something else in Italian, a low string of syllables that danced over her the way he did as he moved down the bed, hooking his fingers in the waistband of her trousers and yanking them down over her hips. He peeled them down her legs and tossed them aside, and Kathryn was shaking. She couldn’t stop shaking.

      And she was still so hot. So needy. Helpless, somehow, in the face of all that yearning and that intense look on his beautiful face.

      “Luca,” she said again, forcing herself to speak because this wasn’t a dream, and reality was coming at her as hard as if the canopy had collapsed above her, bringing the whole of the château down with it.

      “I have to taste you,” he growled at her, his voice thicker and rougher than she’d ever heard it before, and that, too, slicked through her like