It Started With A Proposition: Blackmailed into the Italian's Bed / Contract with Consequences / The Passion Price
She stared at it for a long moment, as if it was a viper about to strike.
Finally she rose, taking off her jacket and draping it over her bag on the chair before placing her hand in his.
How soft it was, he thought as he drew her onto the polished wooden dance floor. Soft and pale, with long, elegant fingers and exquisitely kept nails.
She’d always had a thing for painted nails, he recalled. Both fingers and toes. Her favourite colour had been scarlet, but she’d had bottles and bottles of nail polish, of every imaginable shade.
Tonight her fingernails were painted a deep cream, matching her blouse.
Now that her jacket was off, he could see she still had a lovely figure, despite being thinner: her breasts were still pert, her waist was tinier than ever, and her stomach athletically flat.
His mother would have said she didn’t have good childbearing hips—the way Italian girls did—but Gino had always found Jordan’s slender shape extremely attractive. He loved her tight little butt and her long slim legs, loved her blonde hair and her pale soft skin.
Naked, she looked like an angel.
‘Put your arms up around my neck,’ he suggested, after he swung her round to face him.
‘You always were a bossy man,’ she replied, but did as he wanted, her fingertips like velvet as they slid under the collar of his leather jacket and settled on the sensitive skin at the nape of his neck.
Gino swallowed when he started to respond. This was not what he’d intended when he’d asked her to dance. But he seemed powerless to stop himself from becoming excited.
Planting his hands on her hips, he kept his lower half a decent distance from hers—not an easy thing to do once she started swaying to the slow, thudding beat of the music.
His good intentions, Gino suspected, were doomed to failure.
‘You are real, aren’t you?’ she said suddenly. ‘Not some figment of my imagination.’
‘I’m very real,’ he said drily. Just as his arousal was.
Her head tipped charmingly to one side as she looked up at him.
‘Amazing,’ she murmured. ‘And you’re not fat at all.’
He tried not to laugh. If only she knew…
‘Why would I be fat?’ he asked.
‘Lots of men gain weight after they turn thirty. What are you now? Thirty-five?’
‘Thirty-six. You’ve lost weight.’
‘A little.’
‘You’re still very beautiful.’
Her eyes stabbed his with reproach. ‘Don’t, Gino.’
‘Don’t what?’
‘Don’t sweet-talk me.’
‘You used to like me sweet-talking you.’
‘I used to like you doing a lot of things.’
He wished she hadn’t said that. Her words were sparking memories which would have been better kept buried.
And they in turn sparked something he’d been trying to deny all day, struggled to control ever since he’d asked her to dance. Which was that he still wanted her—despite the years which had passed, despite everything. He wanted to take her upstairs to his hotel room right now and strip her of those sexless clothes, wanted to take down her hair and just take her, as he had ten years ago.
She’d been a virgin back then, a fact he hadn’t realised till it was too late. Her innocence had shocked him at the time, but her passion had quickly banished any qualms.
That passion was still there: he could see it in her blazing blue eyes and flushed cheeks.
And it was still overriding his conscience.
‘Some things don’t change,’ he growled.
‘Everything changes, Gino. Nothing stays the same.’
‘Is that so?’
His hands shifted, one sliding up her spine, the other downward to her tailbone, giving him the leverage to press her close.
As their bodies made more intimate contact a wave of dark desire ripped through Gino, obliterating what little was left of his conscience.
‘This hasn’t changed, beautiful,’ he whispered huskily.
JORDAN stiffened, then tried to stop dancing altogether. But he would have none of it, keeping her body jammed tight against his as he moved his hips from side to side.
Impossible to ignore his arousal.
Gino was impressively built. Her mind flashed back to the first time he’d made love to her. Or tried to. She’d never forgotten the shocked look on his face when he’d realised she was a virgin. She’d begged him not to stop, and he hadn’t, his initial penetration punching a pained cry from her lips.
She’d gloried in the experience, impatient to do it again as soon as possible. Afterwards he’d run them both a bath and lain her on top of him in the warm water, caressing her body. Then he’d dried her and carried her back to her bed, where he’d made love to her again, not stopping till she’d fallen into a deep sleep.
He’d given her tender body time to recover from his initial onslaught. Next morning, when he’d entered her, she’d welcomed him with a wild, wanton need. She’d climaxed swiftly and noisily.
After that, she’d always come whenever he was inside her.
Feeling his rock-hard flesh pressing into her stomach reminded her of how that felt: Gino being inside her.
Jordan suppressed a groan, burying her head under his chin to hide her flushed face from his eyes.
‘I’m up here for the weekend,’ he murmured, his lips in her hair. ‘I’m staying here at this hotel.’
Jordan’s head jerked back, her eyes disbelieving as she stared up into his darkly handsome face. ‘You’re staying here? At the Regency?’
‘It is fate, is it not?’
Jordan shook her head. ‘I don’t believe in fate. Things are not predestined, Gino. People have free will. And choices.’
‘And what would you choose, Jordan, if I asked you to come up to my room with me?’
Jordan’s lips fell open. The arrogance of him! And the presumption!
But, oh…the passion. It blazed down at her from his beautiful black eyes, reminding her of his extraordinary virility and amazing sexual stamina. When they’d lived together it had been nothing for Gino to make love to her for hours on end, with only the shortest of breaks in between. He’d claimed he couldn’t get enough of her, and his actions had backed up his words.
Gino had never been the first one to go to sleep. She’d been the one who usually pegged out, exhausted but happy.
‘What for, exactly?’ she snapped, even as she quivered inside at the thought of going up to his room with him. ‘An old-times’-sake shag? Sorry, but I don’t do one-night stands, Gino. I never did. You must remember that.’
‘I remember everything about you,’ he said, his voice vibrating with the most seductive emotion. ‘And I’m not after a one-night stand. I want you to stay the whole weekend with me. I also want the opportunity to talk to you. To explain why I didn’t come back for you all those years ago.’
Jordan’s wildly galloping heart skittered to an unsteady