people, or life, do things to me. I’m taking charge, as of now.”
“I’ll hold you to that. And Phoebe…” Her heart dropped a beat at the harshness that suddenly blazed on his face as he cast a look behind him. “It’s Leandro, isn’t it?”
This time she didn’t consider denying it. She even told him how things stood. She was done hiding things.
Armando digested this with a frown. “He might be the power Castaldini needs now, but he always was like a force of nature, unstoppable and indiscriminate on his quest for greatness. Now that he’s fulfilled his potential…” He suddenly caught her by the shoulders. “Stay away from him, Phoebe.”
Her eyes escaped his, clung to Leandro. “I can’t, Armando.”
“If he hurt you before, he will destroy you now.”
“Don’t worry. I’m not a silly twenty-year-old anymore.”
“It’s because you’re a mature and very sensible thirty-year-old that I am worried. What you felt when you were barely an adult will pale in comparison to what you’re capable of feeling now.”
She touched his hard cheek, loving him, but knowing she’d never be in love with him. She had terminal one-man-woman disease. “Here’s another possible outcome to all this. That I’ll put things in perspective, purge them and move on.”
He clearly wasn’t buying that. Then he gritted his teeth. “I may not be as powerful as he is—yet. But if he ever hurts you again, I’ll destroy him. Tell him.”
And with that he turned on his heel and strode away. She stared after him, stunned. Who knew Armando was capable of all that passion? Evidently it had taken his late wife—and Leandro—to rouse the sleeping tiger. Not her. Thank God.
Speaking of tigers, an even more impressive one, the one for her, had gotten rid of his human shackles and was stalking toward her with danger and desire blasting off him.
“That was quite a conversation,” he drawled.
She cocked her head at him. “Yes, it was.”
“Nothing more to say?”
She sighed. “You like to say that, don’t you?”
“I can’t think of anything I dislike saying more. You have a habit of forcing me to say it.”
“I’m making the poor mogul prince do things against his will?”
Emerald fire leapt in his eyes. “You could make an army of mogul princes jump in the air and stay there until you say ‘down.’”
She exaggerated a flutter. “Whoa, I must be super potent.”
“And how. And you are super exasperating, too.”
She gasped in mock innocence. “What have I done now? Besides ignore another of your infringing allusions?”
He snatched her hand to his lips for a compulsive kiss. “How many years will it take you to get enough of saying that to me?”
He was telling her she had…years? Figure of speech, girl. “What you’re saying is, find some fresh lines, huh? Drat. I loved that line. I was so proud of how pompous it sounded. I churned it up to give you the benefit of all those important-sounding words I learned in law school.”
He growled, bit into the flesh at the base of her thumb. “You talk too much, yet say nothing. The sure sign of a master lawyer.”
She gasped at the pleasure shooting from her thumb to her core. “Says the master mogul-cum-diplomat.”
“Phoebe, voi shaitana bella, you beautiful devil, tell me what Armando had to say that took so long and looked so serious.”
“Why don’t you ask him? You are related, after all.”
“Si, and I used to even like the man. Now you’re really putting il bastardo in harm’s way.”
She giggled. “What a coincidence. He thinks of you just as highly and feels as much goodwill toward you.”
“Infischio di lui—I don’t give a damn about him or what he thinks of me, or whether he’d like to have my head on a pike.”
“Ooh, such aggression. Has anyone told you how absolutely beautiful you are when you’re caught in a fit of hostility?”
“Porca l’oca—damn, Phoebe, you’d test Gandhi’s restraint.”
“I’m so glad you think so.” Before he could answer, she reached up and pressed her mouth to the throbbing pulse at his corded throat. “But with the way you’re prevaricating, I’m beginning to think you really don’t want to take me to your home.”
He rumbled something that zapped her nerveless, snatched her up, took her lips to within a hair’s breadth of sanity.
When breathing became an emergency, he let her go, left her clinging, panting. “Don’t stop…”
“Have to…I started this…again…and I promised…”
Yeah, and she’d made him do both. Start this. And promise.
This time, there’d be no one to blame but herself.
Ten
“Why didn’t you ever tell me you lived in paradise?”
Phoebe stretched up on her tiptoes, arched her back, opened her arms wider as if to encompass the beauty around her.
Layer upon layer of natural and man-made wonders stretched as far as she could see, drenched in the Mediterranean sunlight and swathed in the western sea breeze.
She’d read up on this place when she’d learned it was Leandro’s birthplace. No wonder Moorish poets described it as “pearls set in emeralds.” That was exactly what this place and the town and countryside it overlooked resembled. Pearly buildings set in emerald nature. They should have added the sapphire, aquamarine and gold of the sea, sky and sandy beaches to the setting.
The palace complex sprawled in multiple levels over the mountainous site, the park around it overgrown with wild-flowers and grass and teeming with roses, orange trees, myrtles and dense elms. Its resident nightingales had been filling the night with songs on their arrival, but now the silence was penetrated only by the sound of water surging in fountains and flowing in cascades.
Leandro came up behind her, stopped millimeters from touching her, creating a force field of screaming sensuality between them, his lips hovering in a path of destruction from her temple to the swell of her breasts. Then he took the same path up. This time he breathed, exhaled his hunger over her. “Would it have gotten you here sooner if I had?”
She collapsed back against him, knowing what a phoenix felt like, burning to ashes only to be recreated, over and over. “How much sooner than forty-eight hours could I have been here?”
“Forty-eight minutes.” His murmur thrummed inside her in a path that connected her heart and core, sending both gushing. “Forty-eight seconds. I should get my R & D department working on teleportation. All that commute time was pure torment…”
His voice plunged on the last word, lurching through her with enough power to whirl her away from him. “You should talk about torment. You invented it.”
He surveyed her, giving new meaning to lord-of-all-he-surveyed. “If I did, you must share dibs on the patent.”
“Okay, from one tormentor to another, how about we do something else for a change? Have a truce and explore your paradise?”
“The one I’ve been cast out of, you mean?”
His tone was unchanged, that teasing, tempting burr. But she felt it. Eight year’s worth of damage and disgrace. It wrung from her the now second nature urge to ease his