The Sicilian's Passion. Sharon Kendrick

suck, just like a baby.

      ‘Or are you afraid to tell me?’ He swallowed as he felt the moist plumpness of her mouth encasing his thumb.

      For reply she sucked again, hard. She saw his responding shudder, heard the sigh which was very nearly a groan as he muttered a harsh imprecation in what she presumed was Sicilian.

      She lifted her eyes to his. Afraid? All she knew was that she had never wanted a man so much and so unequivocably. She always played the respectable game. The getting-to-know-you-and-then-we’ll-see game. Except that most times the getting-to-know-you bit had been enough to kill any desire stone-dead. And she always played by the rules, too—rules which Giovanni Calverri seemed hell-bent on redefining.

      ‘Such an independent woman,’ he teased, but there was a dark undertone to his taunt. ‘With her fantastically successful company. Everything she wants, except the one thing she really, really wants—’

      ‘You,’ she breathed, the words coming out as thick and sweet as honey before she could stop them, ‘I want you.’

      His triumph at her admission was fused with despair. He had expected resistance—an appalled, outraged resistance. Not eager compliance so thinly disguised.

      In the moment before he claimed her mouth he knew how doomed sailors must have felt, lured to their fate by sirens who tempted as this woman now tempted him.

      He forgot his flight, forgot all about his reasons for flying home to Sicily. He felt the burst of desire which would not, could not, now be denied, and with a small angry growl he pulled her into his arms and began to kiss her.

      In the dark heat of longing, she opened her mouth to his, feeling the tension in his hard body. One taste and she knew that she was lost—it was that complete and that immediate.

      ‘Oh, my God,’ she moaned as his tongue began to trace a moist circle inside her lips.

      ‘Your prayers will not help you now, cara,’ he mocked, still with that slight edge to his voice. But as he felt her body melt closely into his he responded with a raw hunger which drove the last lingering traces of guilt away.

      It seemed forever since he had kissed a woman, and these were new lips. Erotic lips. Lush and scented with wine. He groaned and plundered deeply, his hands tightening around the small indentation of her waist, unable to resist the curve of her hips and the cup of her bottom. He pushed up her skirt until the flat of his hands were exploring the cool globes laid bare by the thin, lacy thong she wore, and he felt that he might explode. ‘You dress to kill,’ he shuddered.

      And she felt like she was dying. With need. And with pleasure. She felt her arms snake instinctively around his neck as her hips melded into the rocky power of him, thinking that it was too long since she had been in a man’s embrace like this. She pressed her breasts against him, and he groaned, turning her in his arms and pushing her up against the wall, one lean, muscular thigh prising its way authoritatively between hers, and she felt the pooling of desire as it slicked against her thong.

      She pushed him away from her, but only so that her fingers could fly to the buttons of his fine silk shirt, clumsily freeing them from their confinement, and he replied by swiftly unclasping and unzipping her skirt. It fell to her ankles immediately, and she stepped over it, wearing nothing now but a cashmere vest and a lacy thong.

      With another small, angry growl of desire, Giovanni feasted his eyes on the front of the white thong, where the faint red triangle of hair tempted him from behind the flimsy lace. Her fingers were now scrabbling at his belt, and they were turning and touching like a pair of demented dancers, clothes falling free as they frantically kissed their way out of the sitting room.

      He felt his hardness grow explosive, aware that their frenzied path had brought them to a door which he assumed must be to her bedroom.

      Unprepared and unwilling to accept a moment’s more delay, he scooped her up into his arms.

      ‘Giovanni—’ she gasped.

      The blue-black eyes glittered obdurately. ‘What?’

      ‘Where are you taking me?’ As she spoke the words, she knew that it was a foolish and redundant sentence, and his abstract, almost cynical smile told her that he felt exactly the same way.