One Night: Red-Hot Secrets. Penny Jordan
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had made no attempt to take their relationship any further. Instead of taking up her silent invitation he’d backed off from her—even if on one particularly hot, sultry afternoon towards the end of the holiday he had been so obviously furiously angry at finding her in the village bar with Pietro that she had been sure he was jealous.
‘You are risking your reputation with your behaviour,’ he had told her when she had accused him of jealousy later. ‘It is that which concerns me on your behalf.’
‘What about Pietro?’ she had challenged him. ‘Isn’t he also risking his reputation?’
‘It is different for a man—at least here in this part of the world,’ had been his answer.
‘Well, it shouldn’t be. Because it isn’t fair,’ she had told him, with all her own feelings about her relationship with her father intensifying her vulnerable emotions.
Instead of giving vent to her feelings about the unfairness of the community’s customs she should have paid more attention to his warning on a personal level, Louise acknowledged. It was too late for such regrets now, though. Far, far too late.
She had been such a fool, seeing in Caesar’s behaviour towards her what she had wanted to see instead of reality. She had convinced herself that Caesar loved her as passionately as she had him. Naively, even laughably, she had completely ignored the barriers between them, convinced that all that mattered was their feelings for one another, even though Caesar had given her no indication whatsoever that he felt the same way as her.
The night Oliver had been conceived she had been desperate to see him. He’d been away from the village on business, and when she’d heard that he had returned her need to be with him had been so great that nothing could have stopped her from doing what she had done. They were destined to be together—she had known it. Their fates, their futures would be entwined as surely as those of Romeo and Juliet.
She’d hoped that Caesar would come down to the village, and when he hadn’t, fuelled by her longing to be with him, she’d claimed a headache and pretended to go to bed. Instead she’d gone to the castello, sneaking in through the open kitchen door and finding her way to Caesar’s room.
He had been busy working on his computer when she’d walked in, a look of shock stilling his face when he’d seen her. He’d got up from his chair, but when she’d run towards him he had fended her off, demanding tersely, ‘Louise, what are you doing here? You shouldn’t be here.’
Hardly the words of a devoted lover. But she’d been too wrought up and possessed by her own emotions to pay any heed to them. Caesar loved and wanted her, she knew he did, and now she was going to show him how much she loved and wanted him. It had made her feel so grown up to take control of the situation like that. To be the one to drive their relationship forward to the intimate closeness that they both wanted.
‘I had to come,’ she’d told him. ‘I want to be with you so much. I want you so much, Caesar,’ she’d emphasized, closing the door and then walking towards him, removing her jacket as she did so, keeping her gaze fixed on his face as she mimicked a scene from a film she’d seen in London during which the actress slowly removed her clothes as she walked towards the hero.
It hadn’t take her long to get down to her underwear. She hadn’t been wearing very much—just a simple cotton dress under her denim jacket. Even her much prized Doc Marten boots had been exchanged for a pair of slipon flat shoes so that she could step out of them easily. She’d stretched behind herself to unfasten her bra, and then stopped to look right at him and beg huskily, ‘You do it, Caesar. You unfasten it,’ before hurling herself towards him.
He’d caught hold of her immediately, as she’d known he would. What she hadn’t known, though—until then—was how safe it felt to be in his arms, as well as how exciting. Safety and excitement—opposites. And yet right then in Caesar’s arms they had seemed to fit together perfectly—just as she and Caesar would also fit together perfectly when he made her his.
She’d kissed the side of his jaw, overwhelmed by what being so close to him was doing to her. It had been a clumsy, inexperienced kiss, and it had thrilled and shocked her when she’d felt the stubble of his skin beneath the softness of her parted lips. He had felt so male, so alien and dangerous, and yet at the same time so safe—because he was hers, because he loved her.
Believing that had given her the courage to demand, ‘Kiss me, Caesar, kiss me now. Now,’ she had repeated on a soft moan as she clutched at his arms and lifted her mouth towards his.
He’d tried to deny her, to push her away, insisting, ‘This can’t happen, Louise. We both know that. It must not happen.’
Louise hadn’t wanted to listen. She’d been beyond listening, she acknowledged now. She’d heard other girls talking about how it felt to be turned on by a boy, but this was the first time she’d experienced it.
She’d kissed him again but this time as he’d tried to wrench her arms from around his neck they’d fallen together onto the bed, and then she’d felt it—the hard evidence of his arousal.
She’d trembled violently with that knowledge and pressed herself closer to him, ignoring his savage, ‘No, this must not happen.’
Louise stared out into the darkness. It made her feel physically sick now to acknowledge how badly and self destructively she’d behaved. With maturity she could accept that within a man pushed hard enough a certain chain reaction could be activated, transmuting anger into a physical male desire that had nothing to do with any kind of tender emotion for the woman involved.
His hands had locked round her wrists and he’d held her beneath him. His thumb pads, she remembered, had found the racing pulse-points beneath her skin. Totally ill-equipped to understand or handle her own female sensuality, she had cried out in shock as the warmth of his touch caused a weakening longing to surge through her body. That was when it had happened. That was when she had lost all thought of why she was there and had only been able to think about what being so intimately close to him was doing to her. With one heartbeat she had slipped from one world to another, changed for ever by that happening. All her caution had left her, all sense of anything other than what was happening. Like the opening of a floodgate she had started to tell him how much she wanted him, how much he aroused her, how much she loved him, scattering kisses over his face and throat, clinging to him, pleading with him.
If she was trembling now, remembering that moment, then it was because of the night air against the bare flesh of her arms—nothing more. She wanted to go back inside and escape the memories of what it had meant to lie naked in a man’s arms in the scented warmth of the Sicilian night. Behind her the safety of her hotel room would no doubt be smelly with the reality of Ollie’s trainers, its silence broken not by the accelerated breathing of two people possessed by mutual sexual need but by those little noises Ollie was still young enough to make in his sleep. She needed that reality, but the memories linking her to the past, once unleashed, were too strong for her to deny. What had happened that fateful night couldn’t be denied. After all Oliver himself was the living, breathing evidence of Caesar’s possession of her.
From the unshuttered windows of Caesar’s bedroom she had been able to see outlined against the star-studded moonlit sky the distant mountains, and the white-hot heat running through her veins had been every bit as dangerous as Mount Etna’s lava flow.
The fierce grind of Caesar’s lower body into her own, so compulsively male, so previously unknown and yet somehow at the same time immediately recognised by her own flesh, the harsh possession of his kiss, her first true kiss—everything about their intimacy had had a dark magic about it that she had been powerless to resist. There in that Caesar-scented night-dark room she had come of age as a woman, and her body had gloried in that happening.
There was no point in trying to convince herself now that the thrill she had felt then had been solely engendered by the triumph she had felt in arousing Caesar’s desire, because she and her body both knew the truth. The thrill she had felt, the delight and the desire she had felt, had sprung from a need within herself that