CHAPTER ELEVEN
RENZO CRISANTI LOATHED ENGLAND.
He was no fan of great, sprawling London, choking on commuters and tourists and lumbering red buses wherever he turned. He disliked the countryside, oppressively green and ever damp. He preferred his native Sicily, its mountains and sweeping Mediterranean views. England was too dour and grim for a man who had gone from the colorful streets of his hometown to a career racing impossibly fast cars all over the planet.
He might have retired from racing, but that didn’t change the fact that he was a Sicilian. In his opinion, that made him the best of Italy plus that little bit extra—and it meant he was fundamentally unsuited to what the English called their summer.
Even on an evening like tonight in late June, the English sky was wringing itself out, much colder and rainier than it ought to have been in Renzo’s estimation.
He preferred his own small village in the mountains outside Taormina at this time of year. A warmer sea in the distance and a happier sun to go along with the sweep of all that history, with Mount Etna rising in all her glory above it all.
Instead, he found himself just outside Winchester, England, winding in and around rolling hills so far out into the countryside that there was hardly any light. There had been a towering cathedral rising up over the medieval city, but still, Renzo preferred the battered, ageless wilderness of the Sicilian countryside to all this manicured charm. He’d felt hemmed in as he’d driven through the Winchester city center before heading out to the surrounding fields.
He wished he’d followed his initial knee-jerk reaction to this whole situation weeks ago.
Because Renzo had known Sophie Carmichael-Jones was nothing but trouble the moment he’d laid eyes on her.
Steer clear, something had whispered inside him the moment he’d seen her, like a kick in the gut.
But he’d paid that foreboding voice no mind.
Renzo had been in Monaco for the annual motor race, though not as a driver. He’d stopped racing while he was ahead and still in one piece several years back, and had channeled his notoriety into a line of clubs, a few select hotels dotted around Europe, and a vineyard back in Sicily. And where better than Monaco to advertise to the very high-class, European clientele he hoped to serve? He’d been enjoying a drink with some friends when he’d happened to look up and see her.
She had glowed. That was the first thing he’d noticed, as if she’d walloped him with all that shine. She’d worn a metallic gown that had been perfectly demure on its own, but that hadn’t been the source of all that light. That had come straight from her.
Renzo was no stranger to beautiful women. They flocked to him and he, in turn, considered himself something of a connoisseur. But this one... Her dark hair had been pulled back with a certain insouciance, only a few tendrils escaping and showing the faintest hint of a deep copper beneath the lights. Her lips had been painted siren red, her brows were dark, and she’d worn large, gleaming earrings that Renzo had known in an instant were real despite their size. She’d looked elegant. Chic. Endless legs that suggested a certain coltishness and that lovely, inescapably aristocratic face.
But her eyes, brown and shot through with gold, had been so sad.
Their gazes had collided, there on the floor of the Casino de Monte Carlo. Renzo had lost his train of thought. Not something that often happened to a man who’d made his name and his first fortune thanks to his singular focus and steady hands.
He’d stood up from his table, crossed the floor, and found himself standing before her without knowing he’d meant to move.
He had been aware of everything about her, there in the middle of a crowd that he’d hardly noticed. She’d caught her breath. He’d seen color high on her cheeks. And he’d known that the chemistry he could feel, electric and intense, was affecting her, too.
It was insanity.
“You must tell me two things,” he’d told her, feeling as if they were all alone when he knew full well that they were not. That half of Europe stood arrayed around them. He couldn’t seem to bring himself to care. “One, your name. And two, why you are so sad. This is Monte Carlo, cara. Nothing but joy is permitted.”
“I’m not sad at all,” she’d said after a moment, and somehow, he hadn’t been surprised that she was English, though she’d spoken to him in the same Italian he’d used. Just with that unmistakable accent. “That would require far more emotion than the situation warrants. A better description is resigned.”
“You are far too young and much too beautiful for resignation.”
Her lovely lips had curved, and Renzo had wanted nothing more than to taste that red-slicked smile. Then, there. He wasn’t fussy.
“While you strike me as far too sophisticated for such idle flattery,” she’d replied.
Renzo had been in the grip of a fever. Looking back, that was the only explanation. He’d reached over and taken her hand in his—
And they’d both breathed a little heavily at the contact.
He’d been aware of his own heartbeat, intense and demanding. He’d seen her pulse, there in the column of her neck, drumming out the same insistent rhythm. He would never know how he had restrained himself from leaning over and covering it with his mouth.
It had been as if they’d made lightning between them, such wild electricity he marveled the whole of Monaco didn’t burst into flames. It was as if their skin could scarcely contain it.
Renzo had known then and there that he would be inside this beautiful stranger within the hour.
Or die trying.
“Let me try this, then,” he had said, casting aside his customary charm for the urgency the moment appeared to warrant. “I need you, cara. I don’t care who you are or what you had planned tonight. I want you. I want to taste every part of you again and again, until I would know you in the blackest night. I want to taste you in my mouth. I want everything—and then I want to do it again. And again. Until there’s nothing left of either one of us.”
“I don’t believe in immolation,” she’d said, though her voice was hoarse.
“You will.”
She had shuddered. She had swayed slightly on her feet. She shot a look over her shoulder, somewhere through the crowd, then had returned her attention to him.
He could read her need and better yet, her surrender, all over her face.
Renzo had wasted no time. He took her hand in his and led her to the private exit, where he could retrieve his car without any interference from fans or photographers. In moments, they’d been speeding away, up into the hills toward the villa he maintained far above glittering Monaco and the Côte d’Azur spread out below.
“I am Renzo Crisanti,” he had told her, because there was something in him that needed her to know him, whatever that meant. Whatever came next. “And, bellissima, you still haven’t told me your name.”
She had shifted beside him, all sleek lines and the quiet, humming intensity of her considerable beauty—so much like the cars he loved and handled the same way he intended to handle her.
With all his skill and focus. With all the acute ferocity that had propelled