proud.’ He thought how passionate his voice sounded. How he rarely gave so much of himself away to a stranger. Danger.
His fervour drew her irresistibly in and she found herself leaning forward, clasping her hands on her knees. ‘How very romantic!’
Her face was earnest and the green eyes were huge and shining in her heart-shaped face. She looked, he thought with a sudden lurch of his heart, as eager and as animated as a child at Christmas. ‘It is a little,’ he agreed, with a slow smile. ‘Though sometimes I have a battle to rein in my ambitions.’
‘Beware of ambition which overreaches itself, Giovanni,’ she chided softly, without thinking.
‘Shakespeare,’ he observed. ‘Macbeth.’
‘You know the play?’ She couldn’t keep the surprise from her voice, and then saw the dangerous answering glitter of his eyes. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—’
He gave a wry smile. ‘Oh, yes, you did,’ he contradicted silkily. ‘You’d placed me in your stereotypical little box, hadn’t you, Kate? The sophisticated veneer merely masking the Sicilian peasant who lies beneath? More familiar with the Mafiosi than with any kind of literature? Is that what you thought?’
Her lips opened to deny it, but the harsh way he had spoken had stripped away the urbane sophistication of this elegant man who sat opposite her.
And suddenly she saw someone quite unlike any other who had come into the safe confines of her London life. She saw centuries of pride and of striving encapsulated in that lean, hard body, and that proud and beautiful face.
She could not tear her eyes away from him, observing him with the intense preoccupation she usually gave to a house she was about to decorate.
The muscles which rippled beneath the silk shirt were not the pretty-precious muscles of a man who worked out with weights at the gym every morning. This was a man as men were meant to be. Tough and sometimes harsh, and totally uncompromising.
And she found herself wondering how a man like this would treat a woman.
He saw the dull flush of awareness which had spread rosy wings across her high, pale cheekbones and he rose from the sofa before the dull ache of temptation grew stronger. ‘May I use the bathroom?’
‘But of course!’ Thank heavens she had cleaned the sink that very morning! ‘It’s along the corridor—the third door down.’
Once there, he spurted icy water onto his wrists, as if doing that could subdue his heated blood. The eyes that stared back at him from the mirror looked like a stranger’s eyes with their hectic glitter transforming blue to black.
She is just a woman, he told himself. A very beautiful woman, but a woman all the same. And he had resisted many, many women over the years.
On his way back to the sitting room he passed what was obviously her study. He noted that she had left her computer on, and then he heard a loud buzzing, like the muted sound of a dentist’s drill, and saw a wasp as it battered uselessly at the window-pane.
He imagined its sting piercing her pale, smooth flesh and moved towards the insect, his mouth thinning as he acknowledged an inappropriate sense of protectiveness towards her. He raised the flat of his hand to crush the insect, and then relented, flicking the handle so that the window opened, and in that moment the wasp flew free.
As he shut the window he looked down at the scattered papers littered over the desk, and when an instantly familiar word leapt out at him he frowned.
Sicily.
His olive fingers flicked over the sheets and a warmth stole over him as he gazed at the familiar shape of the island. So she was interested in him! Interested enough to bother to come straight back here and look up the land of his birth.
In that one moment he knew that he could have her. Recognised and rejected the tantalising idea before it had a chance to move from mind to body.
He went back into the sitting room.
‘It’s time I was leaving,’ he said abruptly.
Her heart lurched with disappointment, and Kate sprang to her feet. He looked so very right here, in her home—with his proud, dark beauty silhouetted against the golden backdrop of the light-dappled wall. Suddenly, she wanted him to stay.
‘No, don’t go! Not yet!’ She saw him raise his eyebrows, as if such demonstrativeness was faintly distasteful, but her desire not to lose him overrode any sense of maintaining an air of dignity.
‘Please,’ she continued, some instinct spurring her on as she put her hand out to rest in conciliatory fashion on his arm, and she shivered, for the muscle beneath was as honed as she had imagined it would be. Brazenly, she let the hand stay right where it was, her fingers curling around the curved, hard contour in a gesture which was most definitely possessive.
Their eyes met in a moment which was pure electricity, and she read the question that glittered so provocatively from the sapphire depths.
‘I certainly didn’t mean to offend you just now when I seemed surprised by your knowledge of literature,’ she told him softly. ‘Or to stereotype you. I’ve been very ungracious and you have been very kind.’
Giovanni narrowed his eyes as her words were made incomprensible by her touch. But then wasn’t touch the most irresistible of all the senses? He looked down at where her hand rested lightly on his arm—a gesture at once so innocent and yet so profoundly sensual. He felt the almost imperceptible sting where her nails touched him and the blood begin to roar in his ears, because it was what he had wanted since the first moment he had set eyes on her.
To touch her.
No, more.
Much more than that. He wanted the most fundamental communion of all.
He felt the pull of temptation as something primitive flared into life inside him, like a dark, compelling fever which had taken over his body. And it had overtaken her, too—of that he was certain. He could see from the blackened pools which almost obscured the emerald of her eyes that she wanted him. Really wanted him. In the space of a heartbeat he made his decision.
She would have him!
Very slowly and very deliberately he lifted his hand, and cupped her face in his palm as if he had every right to do so, grazing an arrogant thumb over the lush outline of her lips which trembled into immediate and urgent response.
Kate’s knees turned unfamiliarly to water, her stomach warm and melting as desire flooded hotly through her veins and her hand fell redundantly to her side.
‘Giovanni!’ She swallowed, trying to tell herself that all he was doing was touching her lips, for heaven’s sake!
His gaze was full-on, the blue eyes blazing with careless question. If she said no, then he would stop immediately. ‘What is it, cara mia?’ he purred, his accent as pronounced as it was persuasive. The pad of his thumb traced slowly around the quivering Cupid’s bow of her mouth. ‘What is it that you want from me?’
She trembled violently, unable to pull away, wondering just who was this new and over-responsive Kate? Must he think her a brazen fool? A woman who reacted so compliantly to a man she had just met. But suddenly, she didn’t care! She shook her head, her mouth as dry as dust, as she struggled for words which would make sense of her reaction.
‘Tell me.’
‘It’s a little difficult to say anything,’ came her muffled response, ‘when you’re touching my lips like that.’
‘You want me to stop touching them? Is that it?’
Her eyes met his with a fierce, burning look.
‘No,’ he answered, his accent deepening to one of soft reflection as his gaze dropped downwards, and he watched the flowering of her nipples through the cashmere vest. ‘That is the very last thing you want, isn’t it,