Flora's Defiance

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‘If you haven’t I would be happy to take you out to eat this evening,’ Angelo murmured, smooth as silk.

His voice actually set up a chain-reaction quiver down her taut spine and she sat up with a start. She could not credit the invitation and it unnerved her. ‘Thanks, but I’ve already eaten,’ she lied without hesitation. ‘But it was kind of you to offer.’

‘I wasn’t being kind,’ Angelo countered, a rougher edge filtering through his unforgettable drawl.

‘Oh …’ Dry-mouthed and flushed, Flora could not think of a single thing to say and he filled in the silence with complete cool and bid her goodnight. He didn’t like her, she knew he didn’t like her, for the cool censure when he looked at her with those amazing eyes of his was unmistakeable, even if she didn’t know what she had done to deserve that attitude. So why on earth had he suddenly decided to invite her out to dinner? Had he felt sorry for her? The very suspicion made Flora bridle because she had never sought out any man for comfort.

She ordered a snack from Room Service and then went for a quick shower. She ate perched cross-legged on the bed with a book propped open and just knew that Angelo would disapprove. But she had said no and she should be proud of herself, although if she was honest panic and surprise had together combined to ensure her negative response. In addition she had nothing to wear but the suit she had worn to the funeral, since she had only packed casual jeans and a top for her short stay. She could not even imagine dining out in some fancy restaurant in Angelo’s company. On her final visit to Charlbury St Helens, Julie had shown her sister a magazine article featuring a couple of Angelo’s lady friends, beautiful women dressed in cutting-edge fashion, who could match his sophistication and cool.

Regardless of those reflections, Flora could not help wondering what it would have been like to be the sole focus of Angelo’s attention for a couple of hours. Heat bubbled like excitement low in her pelvis and she tensed and suppressed that disturbing line of thought. It was a very long time before she contrived to drift off to sleep again that night …

CHAPTER TWO

THE following day, Angelo was in a business meeting in Rotterdam. But for all the attention he was giving to the exchange of views, he might as well have stayed at home. He was proud of his cool logic and intelligence and could not understand why both had proved insufficient to forecast Flora Bennett’s most recent move. The dinner invitation had offered him a valid way of bringing Flora up to speed on events in her late sister’s life before she got the bad news from the professionals she was consulting that very morning. It would have been tasteless for him to pass on that information at the funeral. But she had, most unexpectedly, turned him down.

Handsome mouth tightening and quite unaware of the attention his unusually long silence was attracting, Angelo shrugged a broad shoulder sheathed in the finest silk and wool mix. He was willing to admit that he had no prior experience of hearing the word ‘no’ from a woman’s lips. It was a fact that the females he met fell over themselves to say yes. Yes to every invite, yes to sex, yes to just about any damned thing he wanted. Women in Angelo’s world were very predictable and he had never had the smallest urge, he told himself fiercely, to walk on the wilder side of life. He had never forgotten the years of misery that had resulted from his late father’s desire to do exactly that with Willem’s mother, a beautiful volatile widow.

But would Flora have slept with him last night? That question came out of nowhere at him before he was even aware of having thought about such a possibility. He was impervious to the covert looks he was receiving as his brilliant blue eyes became even more abstracted. He wanted her. He was even willing to admit that there was just something about Flora Bennett that grabbed him every time he saw her. Yet last night his intentions had been pure.

Of course it was entirely possible that Flora Bennett knew a great deal more about Willem and Julie’s lifestyle than he had had cause to suspect. His lean strong features darkened at that idea. Flora had seen little of her sister since her wedding to Willem, but she could well have decided to give Julie and her problems a wide berth. Angelo had never had that option because the overwhelming need to protect Mariska from her parents’ folly had repeatedly forced him to intervene. Unfortunately taking care of Mariska’s needs would entail building some kind of an ongoing connection with the other side of her family. He might distrust Mariska’s aunt but she was still the only blood relative the little girl had left alive. He could not ignore that bond or the fact that Flora had spent over two hours happily entertaining her niece and had inspired her nanny to remark that Mariska’s English aunt was wonderfully natural with children.

How much weight would the professionals put on that bond or on so admirably maternal a demonstration? Was he prepared to get married just to improve his own claim to the little girl? Angelo shifted uneasily in his seat. The prospect of only sleeping with one woman for the rest of his life appealed to him as much as a dose of poison. Of course he could make marriage more of a business arrangement and retain a certain amount of freedom, he reasoned bleakly. Many women would accept such conditions simply to become a van Zaal with access to a fleet of private jets, a luxurious array of international homes and a huge allowance to spend on designer clothes and jewellery. Angelo had learned very young that it was possible to buy virtually anything he wanted and he was prepared to pay handsomely over the odds to acquire the perfect wife.

A perfect wife who would naturally be blonde, educated, classy and from the Netherlands. Dutch women were wonderfully practical and resilient, he thought appreciatively. He needed a sensible woman from a respectable background who would accept his challenging work schedule without complaint and who would embellish his social and domestic life while still essentially allowing him his privacy. A woman content to enjoy the lifestyle he could give her and make no further demands of him. He decided that as long as the controversial subjects of fidelity or romance were kept off the menu he could face the prospect of marriage for Mariska’s sake. He had become very fond of the little girl.

Emerging from that lengthy and very sobering thought process, Angelo checked his watch and made one of the lightning-fast decisions that he was famous for. After a working lunch to make up for his non-participation in the meeting, he would meet Flora Bennett at the houseboat and tie up the loose ends between them before she left Amsterdam and returned to England. It was the rational thing to do and he was not being influenced by his attraction to her, he assured himself with considerable satisfaction. He was far too level-headed to stray into such hazardous territory with a woman of dubious morals.

Around the same time as Angelo was travelling from his head office in Rotterdam back to Amsterdam, Flora was literally reeling out of the public building where she had met with Mariska’s social work team: she was in deep shock from what she had learned during that encounter.

Shock that she’d had not the slightest idea of what really had gone on in Willem and Julie’s lives, shock that Julie had managed to convince her during their weekly phone calls that they were leading a perfectly ordinary life when, in fact, the very opposite was true. Indeed, both Willem and her sister had resorted to petty crime in an effort to satisfy their addiction to drugs. Her half-sister and her husband had been thieves and drug addicts. Hopelessly addicted, so that despite all pleas and offers of counselling that had been offered to them they had continued on their dogged path to self-destruction. Indeed Willem and Julie had been high when Willem had crashed their car and then he and his wife had died. Flora remained amazed by the stroke of fate that had kept Mariska alive.

Although every attempt had been made to shield Angelo’s privacy it had slowly become abundantly clear to Flora that Willem’s stepbrother had been heavily involved from the outset in all attempts to persuade the young couple to enter a rehabilitation programme. He had also done everything that he could to protect his stepbrother’s child from harm.

In recent months, Mariska had virtually never been left to rely on parental care alone. Either she had been in day care or in her nanny’s care, and when Willem and Julie had partied and Anke had deemed her charge to be at risk she had taken Mariska to Angelo’s home. Yet, even with all those safeguards in place, Flora’s niece could still easily have been killed along with her parents when Julie had chosen to take her daughter out of day care early one afternoon without telling anyone and had got into Willem’s car with her. Mariska’s very survival was a small miracle.

A stiff late spring breeze gusted down the street of tall, narrow and highly ornamental buildings that bordered the canal Flora was walking alongside and her tears chilled on her cheeks. She stepped hurriedly out of the way of a cyclist riding past and sucked in a steadying breath while she paused to consult the map she had bought to help her negotiate the maze of streets.

It was an effort to think straight while she was being eaten alive by a great burst of angry resentment and regret. But her half-sister was gone and nothing could bring Julie back. Yet on whose say-so had Flora been excluded from knowing about and trying to help the young couple? Flora had a very strong suspicion about the identity of that culprit. While the social workers had been bound by rules of confidentiality, only Angelo van Zaal would have dared to leave Julie’s one close relative in ignorance of her plight.

When she’d first moved to Amsterdam, Julie had sent her sister loads of photos, so now Flora had little difficulty picking out the bright blue-and-white-painted houseboat from the others moored on a quiet stretch of water overlooked by a picturesque terrace of gabled houses. After all, she had a framed sunlit picture of that same evocative scene sitting in her home. She stepped onto the deck and as she did so the door of the cabin opened, framing the tall black-haired male whose inexcusable silence over the past year had stoked her umbrage.

For an instant, Flora froze, her wide green eyes locking onto Angelo van Zaal. He looked strikingly elegant if out of place in his formality in a dark grey business suit and silk tie. The suit had the exclusive fit of a tailored designer garment, framing wide strong masculine shoulders and hugging lean hips and long muscular thighs. As he stepped outside the breeze ruffled his luxuriant black hair above his lean, darkly handsome features. The sheer impact of his physical charisma hit her like a sudden blow to the head, leaving her dizzy. She collided with sapphire-blue eyes and her tummy shimmied like a jelly while her breath feathered in her throat.

‘What on earth are you doing here? ‘ she demanded tautly.

‘This seemed to be an opportune time and place to talk to you.’

‘It’s a little late for that now, isn’t it? ‘ Green eyes flashing as emerald as jewels in sunlight, Flora stalked past his tall still figure into the saloon of the houseboat. The spacious interior had a bare look, for all the surfaces were clear and a stack of cardboard boxes spread out from one corner. ‘In fact I would say that talk of any kind between us now would be a waste of your valuable time.’

Unaccustomed to such a bold unapologetic attack, and with his handsome mouth in a sardonic line, Angelo studied her. Colourful copper-coloured hair falling in a lavish windblown cloud round her shoulders, Flora wore a short black trench coat, jeans and a green sweater, and even in that casual garb she looked amazing, he acknowledged with distinct reluctance. She had the transparent alabaster skin of the true redhead and soft pink self-conscious colour defined her cheekbones while he studied her, quietly marvelling at the amount of emotion she contrived to emanate even when she was silent. Trembling with the force of her fury, Flora undid her coat, dropped it down on a seat and spun back to face him.

‘How could you not tell me what was going on here?’ she demanded in ringing reproach. ‘Willem and Julie were my family as well. At the very least I had a right to know that Julie was taking drugs!’

‘She was an adult of twenty-one, Flora. She made her own choice, which was that under no circumstances were you to be told about their problems.’

Flora lifted her chin in challenge. ‘Meaning?’

‘Exactly what I said. I did speak to her and I know for a fact that her social worker urged her to confide in you, but your sister didn’t want you to know that she had got caught up in drugs and I was not in a position to go against her wishes.’

‘I don’t believe that.’ Flora dealt him a furious unimpressed look, convinced that he was simply trying to palm her off with excuses. ‘You always do as you like, Angelo. You’re a strong man. You’re no one’s whipping boy!’

‘Believe me when I tell you that it was a huge struggle to keep the communication lines between me and Willem and Julie open. Their lifestyle was abhorrent to me but for their daughter’s sake it was imperative that I still retained access to them,’ Angelo retorted grimly. ‘Had I gone against your sister’s wishes they would no longer have trusted me and Mariska would have suffered …’

‘So you got involved and I was left on the outside, kept in ignorance of what was happening in Willem and Julie’s lives until it was too late,’ Flora condemned with unconcealed bitterness.

‘I made Mariska’s needs my priority,’ Angelo countered without apology. ‘I did the best I could in a very difficult situation.’

‘Well, the best you could wasn’t good enough, was it? ‘ Flora threw at him fierily, her temper rising again like steam inside a kettle as the sheer awfulness of what she had learned that morning bit into her like painful claws on tender flesh. ‘Less than a year after Mariska’s birth, your stepbrother and my sister are both dead and their child is an orphan!’

His superb bone structure rigid, Angelo surveyed her with cool ice-blue, astonishingly clear eyes set above the smooth olive planes of his handsome face. His eyes had the shockingly vivid clarity of a glacier lake she had once seen in the Alps, she thought absently. It struck her that so far nothing she had said had moved him in the slightest and his rigorous self-control seemed to mock her emotional state.

‘Willem and Julie were a fatal combination,’ Angelo murmured in a tone of flat finality. ‘Willem was weak and troubled, and before they even met Julie was a habitual drug user.’

As the ramifications of that accusation sank in, shocking Flora all over again, she released a jagged laugh of disbelief. ‘How dare you try to blame Julie for what happened to them? How dare you insinuate that she was the prime instigator?’

‘I am telling you what I know to be the truth. I have no desire to malign your memory of your sister.’

Flora shot him an enraged glance, green eyes luminous as green glass on the seashore. ‘Then don’t do it.’

‘I did not hurl the first stone,’ Angelo countered levelly, his attention wandering to the way the fine wool sweater lovingly moulded the small pouting curves of her breasts and defined the slight bump of her prominent nipples. He suspected that she wasn’t wearing a bra and the full taut sensation of heaviness at his groin increased as he imagined peeling off that sweater. It took enormous self-discipline to wrench his mind back from that erotic reverie and her ability to distract him without even trying to do so infuriated him.

‘You could have told me that Willem and Julie had got involved in drugs! ‘ Flora slung at him in a seething undertone, her eyes bright with antagonism and accusation. The growing tension in the atmosphere only put her more on edge. ‘And you could have told me that I had to conceal where I got that information from.’

‘As I’ve already said, when I was unable to persuade either Willem or his wife to stop using drugs or even to enter counselling, my main goal was to protect Mariska from their excesses.’

Flora snatched in an audible breath in an effort to calm her teeming emotions down to a more controllable level. She folded her arms tightly and crossed the floor, her slender spine stiff as a pencil. The dreadful compulsion to stare at him had her in its hold, though, for when she looked once she always had to look back at him again and admire his amazing bone structure, dazzling eyes and tall, powerful physique. That he could stun her even in the midst of a bitter argument outraged her sense of what was decent. In measured rejection she fixed her eyes on the view of the quiet canal beyond the window. ‘It’s so unfair that you’re trying to foist the blame on Julie.’

‘I am not trying to do that,’ Angelo rebutted, his attention jerking away from the snug fit of her jeans over her heart-shaped derrière, for his imagination had really not required that added stimulus in her radius. His susceptibility to her every move around him galled him and gave him a disturbingly unfamiliar sense of being out of control. ‘But I must be honest with you, even if you find that honesty offensive.’

‘It is deeply offensive that you should accuse my sister of having been an habitual substance abuser,’ Flora pointed out thinly, turning back to him for emphasis while her tongue slid out to moisten the dry curve of her lower lip.

‘Even if I know that to be true?’ Instantly engaged in picturing the effect of that small pink tongue tip on a highly sensitive part of his own anatomy, Angelo surveyed the sultry raspberry-tinted fullness of her mouth with driven concentration. She was making him feel ridiculously like a sex-starved adolescent boy and his hands clenched into defensive fists by his side.

‘How could you possibly know such a thing to be true?’ Flora flung in angry, scornful dismissal of that claim. She clashed head-on with his electrifyingly blue eyes, which might as well have been lit by tiny blue flames for she had the sensation of heat dancing over her entire skin surface. She flushed and her nipples tingled almost painfully while a scratchy sensation of warmth and awareness settled between her legs. In an uneasy movement, she shifted position off one foot on to the other.

‘I know because I had Julie privately investigated before she married Willem,’ Angelo admitted with unapologetic gravity. ‘As a student in London your sister was running with a druggie crowd and regularly took ecstasy and cocaine. Even though she was pregnant she brought those habits to Amsterdam with her and it wasn’t long before my stepbrother joined her and the two of them began to experiment with heroin.’

As Angelo spoke Flora had fallen very still and her eyes were very wide and dark with dismay. ‘You had Julie investigated? There must be some mistake?’

‘There was no mistake,’ Angelo told her steadily, noticing how pale she had become, noting too how that pallor merely accentuated her bright copper hair and lustrous green eyes. Even her prickly argumentative nature could not detract from her considerable appeal. ‘The report was done by a reputable firm and it was very detailed. I’m afraid that even as a teenager your sister was a heavy user of recreational drugs—’

‘It’s not possible. When Julie was a student, she was living with me,’ Flora confided, and her voice slowly trailed away as she took that thought to its natural conclusion and looked back in time, a sinking sensation forming in the pit of her stomach.

Unfortunately, Julie had moved into Flora’s flat and started college during what was a very fraught period in her older sister’s life. Flora had had to put in very long hours at work while being harassed by a bullying boss. She had also been struggling to keep a demanding fiancé happy and she had not been able to give her half-sister the time and attention that she would have liked. Even so, she valued her memories of their time together back then and had seen nothing in Julie’s behaviour that might have suggested that there was anything seriously amiss in her life. Certainly Julie had enjoyed a very active social calendar, but then so did most students, Flora reasoned ruefully. She did recall the very late hours the younger woman had kept and Flora, who’d had to be at work early, had usually been asleep by the time her sister came home. Julie had also been very prone to changeable moods and staying in bed all day at weekends, but that kind of behaviour could surely be ascribed to many teenagers?

‘If Julie took drugs in those days, and I’m not sure I can accept that that could be true,’ Flora breathed abruptly and without warning discovered that her eyes were prickling with tears, ‘I hadn’t the slightest idea of what she was up to.’

Angelo, who had a conscience as tough as the steel his factories manufactured, saw moisture shimmer in her beautiful green eyes and he closed the distance between them without even being aware of a prompting to do so. Bare inches away from her, he faltered to a halt and hovered, suddenly uncharacteristically uncertain of what to do next because he was a man who had always walked the other way or turned a blind eye when women got upset. But he stared down into her tear-wet face and in an action that felt ridiculously natural to him, but which was actually not at all his style, he reached for both her hands to hold them firmly within his.

‘Don’t cry,’ he told her urgently. ‘Don’t blame yourself for this fiasco. Many well-intentioned and experienced professionals tried and failed to help Willem and Julie. Sometimes no matter what you do you can’t change things. What happened to them is in no way your fault.’

And Flora recognised his sincerity and finally accepted that the sad tale he was telling her was indeed the truth as he knew it. Guilt cut through her, though, like a knife as her first thought was that she had failed her sister when Julie had needed her most. While they’d been living together, she should have realised that Julie had problems and watched over her more closely. She should have refused to accept the seemingly little white lies and excuses that, even then, she had suspected her sibling was prone to hiding behind and probed more deeply, asking the awkward prying questions that she had swallowed back for the sake of peace. In those days, Flora had been afraid to tax their new sibling bond by acting too much like a pseudo-parental figure. And tragically that dangerous desire to be liked and to seem younger and more hip had evidently ensured that Julie had been free to take the first fatal steps towards becoming a drug addict.

‘Julie had such a h-horrible childhood!’ Flora stammered chokily, unable to silence the words brimming to her lips in her need to defend her late sister from the bad opinion he must have formed of her. ‘She used to see my father out shopping in town with Mum and I and she had to pretend she didn’t know him, even though he was her father as well. His affair with her mother, Sarah, was a big secret and it meant that for years and years while Julie was growing up she had to live a lie. That background left scars, of course it did. She lived to be noticed, she craved love and attention—’

‘It’s not your fault, querida. You were not her mother. You had no control over her. What, realistically, could you have done to change anything?’ Angelo replied soothingly, his dark deep drawl fracturing as he stared down into her tear-bright green eyes.

That close to his lean, powerful body, Flora could smell the distinctive scent of his skin, an intoxicating mixture of citrus overlaying husky male, and as she drank in that aroma it made her tremble. A little inner voice whispered caution, warned her to step back and keep her distance from him, but her feet might as well have been nailed to the floor. She could feel herself beginning to lean forward, her attention locked to those unforgettable features of his, memorising the high line of his patrician cheekbones, the stubborn strength of his jaw and the arrogant jut of his classic nose. He drew her like a rock in a violent storm at sea.

He bent his proud dark head and parted her lips with his wide sensual mouth and it was as if she had been waiting all her life for that one kiss as it ran through her like a depth charge and struck deep in a sensual and potent explosion. Her hands flew up and clenched into his wide strong shoulders. It couldn’t be him, she thought momentarily in wonderment, it couldn’t possibly be Angelo van Zaal who was making her feel as though she were racing with her heart pounding on a wild roller-coaster ride. The pall of apprehensive isolation and loss that had dogged her since she had flown out to Amsterdam was suddenly banished.

One kiss led straight into the next and her fingers dug into his jacket for support to keep herself upright. Shaking, she felt a shudder rack his big powerful body against hers and she exulted in the hand he closed to her hip to press her into provocative contact with the hard swell of his erection. Something that had turned her off other men turned her on with him. The very knowledge that she aroused him went to Flora’s head and because of what had happened in the past she gloried in that intoxicating proof of his masculine response to her. She was dizzy, exchanging feverish kisses while the passion exploded through her like a shot of brandy on an icy day. Heat sizzled through her veins and pooled low in her tummy. She discovered that she couldn’t make herself let him go for long enough to catch her breath.

‘You’re wearing far too many clothes,’ Angelo said thickly.

Flora looked up at him, revelling in the temperamental glimmer of stormy blue visible below his dense black lashes. She was amazed by the discovery that he was not one half as calm, cool and controlled as she had always believed. There was a wild hunger in that appraisal that gripped her imagination like a key to a locked door, promising her a glimpse of the unknown. Angelo was gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous, but until that heady moment of recognition he had always been a closed and forbidding book to her. Just then seeing him look at her as though she were the most desirable woman alive was balm to a self-esteem that had once been battered to pulp when the man she loved rejected her.

Her fingers slid from his shoulder down onto his shirt front, spreading starfish fashion on the muscular heat of his powerful chest. With a gruff sound in his throat his mouth swooped down on hers again with a dominant force that sent a primitive shiver of delight darting through her slender length. He pulled her back against him and eased a hand below her sweater to cup a small pouting mound topped by a swollen pink nipple. A gasp parted her lips below the marauding pressure of his mouth and his tongue darted deep in the moist interior. The effect of that driving passionate kiss, added to the effects of the blunt masculine fingers toying with the peaks of her breasts was more than she could bear and she sagged against him, her legs refusing to hold her up.

‘Come here, querida mia,’ Angelo growled, hauling her up into his arms without further ado and kissing her with passionate fervour.

CHAPTER THREE

THIRTY seconds later, Flora’s lashes lifted. She was lying on a bed in a compact cabin. Her sweater had gone and, mortified by the sight of her bared breasts, she raised herself on her elbows ready to call time on the extraordinary event that was unfolding when she focused on Angelo.

He had already shed jacket and tie and his shirt hung open on a bronzed hair-roughened torso and the flat corrugated planes of his stomach. He looked amazing, every inch a male pin-up worthy of a centrefold. The oxygen Flora needed just vanished from her lungs without warning.

‘How did this happen? We shouldn’t be doing this …’ she gasped breathlessly, suddenly thinking about the sister she had lost and mentally squirming away from that painful reminder to take refuge in the present again.

’Dios mio … don’t ask me to stop, querida,’ Angelo urged, blue eyes electrifyingly hot and hungry as they collided head-on with hers. ‘I’ve never wanted any woman as much as I want you at this moment.’

Cheeks burning with self-consciousness, Flora hunched her shoulders and crossed her hands over her naked chest, embarrassed by the insubstantial size of her womanly curves, while her bemused thoughts were already replaying what he had just said. It shook her how good she felt being Angelo’s object of desire and how much she liked the fact that he was unzipping his wellcut trousers with more haste than cool while seemingly unable to drag his gaze from her where she lay on the bed. In truth, she acknowledged in an instant of pure insight, any form of human contact and comfort eased the terrible bleak pain of the realization that she would never see her little sister again.

‘You are so beautiful,’ Angelo murmured in a dark deep voice that had a wonderfully distracting effect on her because she was desperate to avoid the desolate thoughts hovering on the horizon of her mind. ‘I’ve wanted you for so long.’

‘If you did you hid it well from me,’ she pointed out helplessly.

‘I’ve surrendered … I can’t hide it any more.’ Angelo stepped clear of the trousers and her mouth ran dry. Clad in silk boxers that defined more than they concealed, Angelo was an intimidating sight for a woman who was still a virgin. Of course that was not a truth that Flora was eager to brandish. Her lack of experience was more an accident of fate than a deliberate choice, for she had not got close enough to consider intimacy with anyone since her engagement had been broken off three years earlier.

‘I’m not beautiful,’ she told him almost defiantly, unwilling to trust him or any man.

Angelo suddenly smiled and his lean dark face lit up with a brilliance that made her heartbeat pick up speed as he came down beside her on the bed. ‘I think you are and I’m only interested in my own opinion.’

When he smiled she felt as if she could fly, but Flora had no time for such fanciful thoughts and she was bone-deep stubborn, shrugging off the way he could make her feel to add in a tone of distinct challenge, ‘I’m much too tall for a woman—’

‘I’m tall and you’re the perfect size for me,’ Angelo countered, undaunted by her comeback as he joined her with predatory grace.

Men had always tended to find Flora too bluntly spoken for comfort but Angelo appeared to take that candour very much in his stride. He captured her hands in his so that she could no longer hide her body from him.

For a timeless moment she lay there while he caressed her wrists with his thumbs, his attention hotly pinned to the stiff crests of her prominent nipples. ‘You have very pretty breasts,’ he husked, intense blue eyes embellished by lush black lashes.

Embarrassment claimed her. She could not be comfortable lying there half naked in broad daylight. She shut her eyes tight and wondered what insanity had come over her and then he kissed her again and the insanity came back with a vengeance, blurring all rational thought and inhibition. Nothing had ever felt so sweet or so necessary to her as his mouth. His tongue plunged into the tender responsive interior of her mouth and lit her up inside like a fire. She had not known that much pleasure could exist in mere kissing.

Her hands sank into his black hair as he nibbled down the cord of her slender neck and began to centre his attentions on her swollen sensitive breasts. His tongue lashed over the tender tips before the graze of his teeth on her delicate flesh made her cry out and tremble while the burn of excitement travelled straight to the moist heat gathering at the heart of her body. He pressed the heel of his hand against the apex of her thighs and she writhed, helpless beneath that pleasure inflicted on the most sensitive part of her. She felt the zip give on her jeans, her hands falling from him as he sat up to remove the garment.

‘This is crazy,’ she muttered jaggedly, ‘out of control.’

‘I’ve never been out of control in bed before. It’s exciting,’ Angelo confided, pushing up her face with an impatient hand to steal another explosive kiss.

And when his hard, hungry mouth was sealed to hers, nothing mattered and nothing else existed. He cupped the damp crotch of her knickers and then whisked them off to explore the slick wet folds between her thighs. She was hyper-sensitive there and she dug her hips into the mattress beneath her and little sounds escaped her lips without her volition. Teasing the delicate entrance, he rubbed the tiny bud where all her nerve-endings centred. Drenched in exquisite waves of pleasure beyond any she had ever experienced, she became ever more frantic. A sense of pressure was building in her tummy and a pulsing ache stirred between her legs, making her feel unbearably taut and needy.

Angelo slid between her thighs. She looked up at him with apprehensive green eyes, reacting to the probing feel of him against her most intimate place. He shifted and sank into her, stretching her hot tight channel with his girth and length. His hungry growl of pleasure masked her hastily swallowed huff of pain as he thrust past her resisting flesh and filled her to the hilt.

‘You’re so tight you feel incredible,’ Angelo groaned, blue eyes radiating deep sensual satisfaction as he gripped her hips in hard hands and moved slowly and erotically, acquainting her with the full extent of his power.

Instinct made her arch her spine and rise up as he withdrew and slammed back into her in a pagan rhythm that made her every sense sing. Her body wasn’t her own any more. Invaded and controlled by his driving urgency and her own need to answer its demands, she was overwhelmed by the thunderously exciting rise of pleasure. The pressure built and built to a nerve-racking high inside her. She squirmed and writhed in the last seconds before an explosive orgasm ripped through her trembling body like an earthquake, sending sweet shards of ecstatic pleasure shooting through every limb.

Afterwards she was drained and wrapped in a cocoon of exhaustion. He gazed down at her, blue eyes shimmering, and he kissed her again, slow and deep and hungry. Hungry? He was ready to do it again. She wasn’t and was taken aback by his energy. Animation was returning to her brain and suddenly she wanted a magic lamp to rub so that she could leap fully clothed onto the quay beyond the window and run away as fast as her cowardly legs could carry her. What was she doing? Oh, what had she done, what … had … she … done? Bewilderment and shame drenched her in a tidal wave of regret. Her arms were wrapped tightly round him and she whipped them off him at supersonic speed and jerked free of his embrace.

‘I’ve got to go,’ she told him shakily. ‘Places to go, people to see.’

Wincing at that airhead announcement even as it fell from her lips, Flora scrambled off the bed with a haste she couldn’t hide.

Startled by her abrupt flight from his arms, Angelo pushed himself up on his elbows and rested frowning dark blue eyes on her. ‘What’s up? ‘

Stark naked, wreathed in blushes and with not the smallest idea where the bathroom was, Flora hovered in horrible confusion. What’s up? she almost screeched back at him. Are you that insensitive that you think this situation, this appalling misstep, could possibly be acceptable?