he queried.
‘I like it…very much.’
‘Perfetto.’ He took another sip, aware that his heart was pounding with a strangely slow and heavy beat. He could see the swell of her breasts brushing against the fine material of her top and, despite the warmth of the evening, how her nipples were perking in pert points.
He was aware of the sweet pain of his erection, which was pushing against him, and suddenly he felt like a schoolboy, aware that the evening had cast him into a role in which he was unfamiliar. That for once he was playing a game and he didn’t know how it would end—or even which rules to engage. Normally, when he wanted a woman he didn’t even have to try. A glance, a murmur, a hint of sensual promise in his eyes was enough to capture his quarry.
Yet with Aisling, it was different. The unthinkable had happened because he simply didn’t know whether she would be willing to be seduced. Or whether you should be breaking the rule of a lifetime and sleeping with someone with whom you have a professional relationship—someone you employ!
But he ignored the voice of his conscience—for something much more compelling was driving him. He wanted her and he would have her. ‘We should eat something,’he said suddenly.
Aisling looked at the nearby tables, which were completely covered with food. Platters of anchovies and whitebait, and colourful dishes of salad. A whole small roasted pig sat close to pasta with wild boar and truffle sauces and yet another table was stacked with cheeses and figs and ripe peaches, the fruit tumbling over the bowls like a still-life painting.
The whole scene was exquisitely beautiful and yet, more than anything, it seemed to represent the huge differences between them. This was the kind of world Gianluca had grown up in, Aisling realised with a pang. One rich with culture and tradition and wonderful fresh food.
She recalled her own meals of something on toast—meals she’d cobbled together after school—her ear always half cocked for the door, wondering whether her mother would make it home that night.
But there might as well have been sawdust heaped on the table for all the temptation it offered and Aisling had never felt less like eating. ‘I’m just not very hungry,’ she said weakly. ‘It’s too hot to eat.’
‘Yes. Isn’t it?’ Much too hot. He felt the flicker of a pulse at his temple because he had seen her watching him and he wanted to kiss her. Instinctively, he knew that this was the moment to strike, when her lips were half parted in that unconscious invitation, when her whole body had softened—her defences down. He felt the slow, irresistible pulsing of desire.
‘Why don’t we go outside? It will be cooler there and we can look to see if there are any shooting stars. Have you ever seen one before?’ Aisling shook her head.
No? But that is an unspeakable crime!’ He smiled. ‘Don’t you know that the Italian skies are full of them?’
And despite the tension which thrummed between them like the heavy, electric atmosphere before a storm, Aisling laughed. ‘Oh, really?’
‘You don’t believe me? Then come and see for yourself.’
It was one of those life-defining moments. The fork-which-lay-in-the-path moment. The tantalising difficulty of deciding which direction to take. Play safe like she always did—or live dangerously? The quicksand gave way beneath her feet. Just this once, she thought…just this once.
‘Why not?’ she said lightly, as if it didn’t matter. And it didn’t matter—at least, not to him.
And to her?
Aisling didn’t know. A lifetime of hard work and denial and playing to the rules had been vanquished by the tall, powerful man they called Il Tigre on that scented Italian evening. Something alien and tantalising was driving her and she was being propelled by an instinct she was in no mood to fight. Or maybe it would have taken a stronger woman than her to fight the night and the moonlight and the man. This man.
Her heart was beating very fast as they stepped out into the scented air and walked away from the noise of the party in silence, like two conspirators.
The moon was full and the sky full of stars but they weren’t moving anywhere and Aisling quickly turned her face upwards, as if to reinforce the real reason why they were out here. Except that deep down she knew it was not the real reason. Because who cared about stars?
‘Which shooting stars? I can’t see any,’ she said, in a voice which didn’t sound like her own.
‘It is a little late in the year,’ he conceded, but he wasn’t looking at the sky—his attention was captivated by a cloud of dark hair and the pale profile which looked as if it had been carved from marble—intensely beautiful because it was so unexpected. How could he have been so blind not to have seen her loveliness before?
‘You see them mostly in August,’ he said distractedly. ‘The feast day of St Lorenzo is known as the night of the shooting stars—and then you can see meteors showering the skies like fireworks. People consider them lucky and they make a wish.’
‘Gosh. How…romantic.’
‘You like that?’
‘Who wouldn’t?’
‘And yet this morning you told me you preferred the pragmatic approach,’ he mused.
‘Did I?’ But this morning seemed a lifetime ago. She kept looking upwards towards the heavens, losing her gaze in its star-studded blackness, terrified of what she thought might be about to happen—and yet her heart was beating fast with a mad kind of eagerness because she wanted it to begin.
‘Aisling?’
His soft voice made her stop looking at the sky and turn her gaze instead to the sculpted shadows of his face. In the dim light she could see the glitter of his eyes and the gleam of his lips.
Her voice was tremulous. ‘What?’
‘Do you know what I would wish for, if I saw a star blazing across the night sky right now?’
She shook her head, so that the hair moved like a heavy silken curtain. ‘No.’
His lips curved into a mocking smile. ‘Yes, you do,’ he taunted softly as he pulled her into the shadow of a large tree and into his arms.
HIS body was hard, his breath was warm as he pulled her close against him and Aisling could scarcely breathe as every longing she’d ever had about him fused into that single moment. ‘Gianluca!’ she gasped, her voice a mixture of plea and protest.
‘Mia bella! Kiss me. Just kiss me!’
‘But this is wrong!’
‘Why is it wrong? How can it be wrong?’ he demanded.
She tried to think of a reason but her brain had gone to mush and so had her body. Was it the raw urgency in his voice which made her want to obey him without question, or her own overwhelming hunger which made Aisling stay right where she was? Perhaps it was simply the fleeting feeling that if she didn’t, then she would regret it for the rest of her life. That she would become one of those bitter old women who had rejected a taste of paradise when she’d had it offered to her on a soft, warm night in Umbria.
‘You know you want me,’ he asserted harshly.
‘Yes,’ she assented breathlessly. And with a little moan, she wrapped her arms around his neck, lifting her mouth to meet his hard, seeking kiss.
A thousand fireworks exploded in his head as her lips opened beneath his. ‘Aisling,’ he groaned, her name as unfamiliar on his lips as the taste of her, the smell of her, this sheer unexpected reality of having her soft and compliant and oh-so-hungry in his arms. The ice-queen melting! The cool Englishwoman kissing him!
Aisling