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The hand stilled. ‘Shall I stop, then, cara mia?’
Frustration ripped through her. She shook her head helplessly.
He put his lips right up to her ear. He loved her like this. Compliant. His. Her coolness exploding into hot and urgent need. ‘I can’t hear you, Lucy.’
‘No,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t stop. Please don’t stop.’
Triumph coursed through him and possessively he pushed aside the panel of her panties to feel the acutely sensitised flesh. But it was over almost before he had started. He could feel her body begin to tense as he pressed his fingertip against her, and she caught him by the neck and dragged his mouth back down on hers, just as her legs splayed and she made soft, moaning noises of pleasure, like a cat.
They stayed like that for a while, their mouths glued together, his finger still touching her intimately while she continued to spasm against him. When it was over, she drew away, her face sweat-sheened, still shuddering as she shook her head.
‘What did you do that for?’ She gulped breath into her lungs like a drowning woman.
He smiled as he tugged her uniform skirt back down. ‘Because you wanted me to.’
‘We should have waited.’
‘But you didn’t want to.’
No, she hadn’t. It had been a long time—too long—and she had missed him. Had he missed her? she wondered. Even a tiny bit? She turned her eyes up to his, but as usual their glittering ebony depths were impenetrable. She wanted to kiss him again, but kissing seemed almost too intimate. How crazy was that after what had just happened?
‘And what about you?’ she questioned huskily, cupping him quite suddenly. She saw him briefly close his eyes and groan, before snatching her hand away to hold it close to his mouth, letting his breathing grow steady before he spoke.
She could feel his warm breath on her fingertips.
‘But I can…wait, cara,’ he said huskily. ‘That is the difference between us.’
He was always so controlled—always—and in demonstrating his own self-discipline he had drawn attention to her own lack of it! But Lucy knew that there was more than his steely resolve at stake here. Physically, she might be able to change his mind, but mentally she didn’t stand a chance.
He might have shrugged off all the trappings which came with being a prince, but he never ignored the responsibility which came with the title. His mind would have raced and overtaken the demands of his body. He would have imagined all the worst-case scenarios—them being disturbed by the driver, or police, or photographers, and one of the Princes of Mardivino being discovered with an air-hostess bent busily over his lap.
Lucy flushed and moved away, suddenly feeling cheap as she imagined how it would look to an outsider. Woman gets off plane and lets man ravish her in car. A man, moreover, who had never made any promises of commitment to her and never would. Was she valuing herself too low—and, if so, for just how long was she going to let it continue?
‘Cara?’
His voice was soft, and in anyone else you might almost be fooled into thinking that it was tender—but tenderness was an alien concept to Guido.
He saw the way that her eyes clouded and some stubborn inner resistance suddenly melted away. He leaned forward so that their foreheads were touching and began to stroke her hair.
‘Forgive me, Lucy,’ he said softly.
Lucy closed her eyes. For what? For taking her to heaven in an indecently short space of time? Or for drumming home the fact that where sex was concerned he was very definitely the master and she the puppet?
She opened her eyes again. ‘You make me feel helpless,’ she admitted.
He shrugged. ‘Sometimes a woman should be helpless.’
‘But not a man?’ she questioned provocatively.
‘Of course not.’ His eyes sparked back in answering challenge. ‘It is why we were born the stronger sex—did you not know that? We’re conditioned to fight wars and to hunt—not to roll over on our backs like tame little pussycats.’
‘Like I’ve just done, you mean?’
He brushed his lips against hers. ‘Mmm. You were quite perfect. I like to see you like that.’
‘Oh, you’re just a power-freak,’ she said, half crossly.
A smile curved his mouth. ‘But you like that, too.’
‘Sometimes.’ Not always. Sometimes she would give a hundred erotic highs just to see him show even the briefest flicker of vulnerability—but that would be like wishing for the sky to suddenly start raining diamonds instead of hailstones. ‘Sometimes I wish you’d just relax a bit more.’
‘I’ll relax later,’ he promised silkily, and pulled her into the cradle of his arms. ‘I promise you.’
‘I don’t just mean in bed,’ said Lucy primly. ‘It may be an alien concept to you, Guido, but you are allowed to let your hair down at other times.’
‘Shh. Enough. That is enough, cara.’
Lucy rested her head against his shoulder and lapsed into a silence that was just the wrong side of contentment as she registered his unspoken reprimand. Was she nagging him? She stared out of the window just as the expensive car purred its way up Park Avenue and came to a halt in front of a rather beautiful old building.
She turned back to find his eyes watching her intently. ‘Why are we stopping here?’
‘Because we’ve arrived.’
Behind the Titian swing of her fringe, Lucy knitted her eyebrows together. ‘This doesn’t look like a hotel!’
‘That’s because it isn’t.’ He smiled, as if nothing was at stake. But something was, and they both knew it. ‘I thought you might like to see my apartment.’
CHAPTER TWO (#ubde2bfc0-ad63-5ed2-ba60-0c34f30e9d78)
LUCY could read nothing in the ebony glitter of Guido’s eyes, and somehow she kept her own expression casual—even though, deep down, she felt slightly shell-shocked. Guido wanted to take her home! Well, to one of his homes, that would be more accurate. At last. Now, why would that be?
‘Your apartment?’ she questioned slowly.
Not the kind of rapturous excitement he might have expected—which just went to show that in life you should expect nothing. ‘Wouldn’t you like to see it?’
She smiled at him. ‘Of course I would.’
Up until now they’d always stayed in hotels—a city-central room was one of the perks of her flying job and, as a fabulously successful property developer, Guido rented luxury suites all over the world. In New York and in Paris he did actually own an apartment, but Lucy had seen neither.
To be allowed to set foot inside her boyfriend’s home shouldn’t have felt like a major achievement, but somehow it did. Was that what happened when you went out with a man like Guido? she wondered. You began to normalise abnormal behaviour?
He bent to retrieve her hat from the floor of the limousine. ‘Want me to put it on for you?’
She felt her cheeks growing pink as she shook her head. ‘I hate that hat,’ she said, more fervently than her opinion on a hat really warranted, but she could read the expression in his eyes perfectly well. He was remembering how she had come to lose the hat, and what had happened subsequently, and despite her reservations already she could feel the renewed rush of desire.
‘It looks tre`s chic on you,’ he whispered. And then, because he wanted her very badly, he took her hand and kissed it. ‘Come. Let us go inside. The driver will bring your bags.’
‘Are you quite sure about this?’ she murmured, as they rode up in the elevator towards the penthouse.
Actually, Guido had suffered a couple of reservations—until he’d told himself that he was in danger of becoming some fabled recluse. And he knew instinctively that he could trust Lucy not to gossip about his home.
Idly, he stroked his finger along the indentation of her waist. ‘I want someone to sample my cooking.’
This time Lucy couldn’t hide her surprise as she tried and failed spectacularly to imagine him in the kitchen. ‘You mean you cook?’
‘Actually, no, I don’t.’ His black eyes gleamed. ‘Do you?’
Lucy nodded solemnly. ‘Oh, yes. I adore cooking. In fact, I adore waiting on men in general. So I do hope you’ll let me run round after you just as soon as we get there. You will, won’t you, Guido?’
It took about three seconds for him to register the sarcastic note in her voice, and he pulled her into his arms. ‘You are a wicked witch of a woman, Lucy Maguire,’ he growled, and began to trail his lips over her cheek.
She closed her eyes, the raw and lemony feral scent of him invading her senses like a potent drug. The teasing comment pleased her, for in his voice she had heard the faintest note of puzzlement.
He couldn’t work her out; she knew that—and she had actively encouraged it—but it was much more than a game to her. He closed himself off from her, so why should it fall on her shoulders to provide a one-way emotional show?
At the moment she had an air of mystery which he found alluring. If she allowed him to twitch that curtain of mystery aside, to let daylight come flooding in, then who knew what would happen?
She turned her head so that her lips brushed warm and soft and provocatively against his, and his eyes widened, surprising her with their hectic glitter.
‘I want you,’ he ground out.
‘I should hope so, too,’ she answered demurely.
‘I want you so badly I could do it—’
‘Here?’ she pre-empted, brazenly cupping him once more. Only this time he didn’t push her away. This time he groaned. She continued to trickle her fingers against his rock-hard shaft, pressing her lips close to his ear, as he had done to her at the airport. ‘Do you want me to unzip you, Guido?’ she questioned softly. ‘To free you and then to slowly take you into my mouth? To lick my tongue up and down until you can hold back no longer and—’
He gave a roar like an angry lion as the lift pinged to a halt, buckling back the doors as if they were the enemy and unlocking his apartment, thanking God that he had had the foresight to dismiss all his staff for the rest of the day.
He slammed the door shut behind them, and Lucy—for all her carefully suppressed curiosity—didn’t get a chance to notice any princely artefacts, for Guido was taking her by the hand in a way which broached no argument. But there again, who wanted to argue? Certainly not her.
He stopped short of actually kicking the bedroom door open, but his punch to it was so forceful that he might as well have done. Only when it was shut behind them did they stand facing one another, like two protagonists squaring up for a fight.
His breathing was laboured, and Lucy’s heart was beating so rapidly that she felt faint. She was blind to the beauty of the New York skyline captured outside the enormous window—blind to anything other than the beauty of his face. She drank in the stark hunger which momentarily made his features look almost cruel, and the knowledge that she had him on a knife-edge of desire filled her with a sense of daring.
He had awoken in her a sense of passion and experimentation which not one of her other—laughably few—lovers had come even close to.
Or was it, mocked a small voice in her head, simply because he was such an accomplished and experienced lover that she felt she had to keep pushing back the boundaries in order to match him?
She put her hands on her hips and surveyed him from between slitted eyelids, her provocative pose at odds with the starchy, almost prim appearance of her navy blue uniform.
‘Would you like me to strip for you…sir?’ she questioned, in a tone of husky subservience.
Guido groaned. Could he bear to wait? And yet could he bear not to? For a man whose hunger had become jaded over years of having exactly what he wanted, this new and acutely keen appetite was something he wanted to savour.
For did not the sensation of hunger make you feel more alive than when you satisfied it? Had the blood ever sung in his veins quite as much as it was doing at the moment? Or the hard ache in his groin threatened to make him fall to the ground in front of her in complete surrender?
He nodded, not trusting himself to speak for a moment as he walked towards the giant bed and lay back against the pillows.
‘Yes, strip,’ he ordered curtly. ‘Strip for me now.’
Lucy let out a sigh as her thumb and finger rubbed at the lapel of her jacket, caressing the material as sensuously as if it was skin. In a way, it was almost a relief to be able to play this game—for the game detracted from reality, and the reality was that Lucy suspected she was falling in love. Dangerous. Oh, so dangerous.
At least while she was acting the sultry siren she was able to stop herself from running over to him and cupping his hard, handsome face between her hands with a sense of wonder, then smothering it with tiny heartfelt kisses, telling him over and over that he made her heart sing and her senses come to vibrant and stinging life.
But that was not what he wanted from her. A man didn’t have to spell it out for you that he was happy with just a casual affair, and Lucy was perceptive enough to have worked it out for herself in any case. And because she wanted to stay in the game she followed the rules that he had set. Did that make her weak? Or simply responsive?
Guido saw her hesitation and groaned, fighting back the urge to have her join him on the bed.
‘Strip.’ His voice rang out, the word a single, clipped command.
His voice was hard, she thought, but his eyes were as she had never seen them before—on fire with need and desire, and she had to steel herself against that look, to stop herself from melting. She slipped the jacket from her shoulders and hung it neatly over the back of a chair.
‘Oh, Lucy,’ he murmured.
She surveyed him steadily. ‘Am I going too slowly for you, Guido?’
He heard the challenge in her voice. Say yes and she would take even longer! He shook his head, not daring—not able—to speak.
She began to undo the buttons of her crisp white shirt and saw him run his tongue over his lips as the garment joined her jacket. Slowly she unzipped the slim navy skirt and let it fall to the ground, so that it pooled by her feet. She stepped out of it. She heard his sharp inrush of breath as she stood before him, wearing just her bra and panties, stockings, suspender-belt and high navy shoes.
She undid the lace brassie`re and as it fell to the floor she began to touch her breasts, capturing his eyes with hers.
‘Come here,’ he whispered.
She shook her head. ‘Not yet. Take your shirt off.’
His throat was dry as he peeled off the layer of ice-blue silk and threw it at her feet.
‘Now your trousers,’ she instructed softly. ‘Take them off.’
His heart was crashing against his ribcage. ‘Why don’t you do it?’ he murmured.
‘Because I want you to.’
‘Oh, do you?’ he drawled.
He was aware that she was treating him as no woman had ever treated him before—and, rather more disturbingly, that he was allowing her to. But the sexual tension which was escalating second by frantic second was just too good and too powerful to resist.
In his highly aroused state he carefully slid off his trousers and briefs, watching with a certain mocking triumph as her eyes widened, her lips forming a pouting and moist little circle when she saw just how turned on he was.
‘Oh, Guido,’ she whispered, on a thready note of wonder.
Her fingertips moved from where they had been circling over her nipple to press between the juncture of her legs and her head fell back. She closed her eyes, and for a moment Guido wondered if she was just going to pleasure herself in front of him. And—in spite of his aching desire for her—wouldn’t that be unbearably erotic to watch?
Driven on by an overwhelming need, he stroked his hand over himself as greedily as a schoolboy, and looked up to find her staring at him. Their eyes met in a moment of complete and silent understanding.
‘Okay, Lucy,’ he said unsteadily. ‘You’ve played your little stripper game. That’s enough. I want you here. Right now.’
