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The evidence of his eyes was troubling. She looked tired, and stressed, and frustrated. If she did have a live-in lover—or a boyfriend—he wasn’t making her very happy.
‘So there’s no special man in your life right now?’ he asked.
She glanced away for a second, then looked back at him. ‘Not right now. Look, I—’
‘Would you dance with me?’ he asked, before she could bolt for the door.
The band had started up again, a bluesy number with a slow, sensual rhythm.
Jordan stared at him. But not so much with anger now. With a type of fear, as if he’d just asked someone scared of heights to step with him to the edge of a cliff.
Maybe she thought he was coming on to her.
He wasn’t. He just wanted to find some way to get past her defences, to have her open up to him about her life.
She was a good dancer, he knew, but so was he. They’d loved going dancing together.
‘For old times’ sake,’ he added, standing up and holding his hand out to her.
She stared at it for a long moment, as if it was a viper about to strike.
Finally she rose, taking off her jacket and draping it over her bag on the chair before placing her hand in his.
How soft it was, he thought as he drew her onto the polished wooden dance floor. Soft and pale, with long, elegant fingers and exquisitely kept nails.
She’d always had a thing for painted nails, he recalled. Both fingers and toes. Her favourite colour had been scarlet, but she’d had bottles and bottles of nail polish, of every imaginable shade.
Tonight her fingernails were painted a deep cream, matching her blouse.
Now that her jacket was off, he could see she still had a lovely figure, despite being thinner: her breasts were still pert, her waist was tinier than ever, and her stomach athletically flat.
His mother would have said she didn’t have good childbearing hips—the way Italian girls did—but Gino had always found Jordan’s slender shape extremely attractive. He loved her tight little butt and her long slim legs, loved her blonde hair and her pale soft skin.
Naked, she looked like an angel.
‘Put your arms up around my neck,’ he suggested, after he swung her round to face him.
‘You always were a bossy man,’ she replied, but did as he wanted, her fingertips like velvet as they slid under the collar of his leather jacket and settled on the sensitive skin at the nape of his neck.
Gino swallowed when he started to respond. This was not what he’d intended when he’d asked her to dance. But he seemed powerless to stop himself from becoming excited.
Planting his hands on her hips, he kept his lower half a decent distance from hers—not an easy thing to do once she started swaying to the slow, thudding beat of the music.
His good intentions, Gino suspected, were doomed to failure.
‘You are real, aren’t you?’ she said suddenly. ‘Not some figment of my imagination.’
‘I’m very real,’ he said drily. Just as his arousal was.
Her head tipped charmingly to one side as she looked up at him.
‘Amazing,’ she murmured. ‘And you’re not fat at all.’
He tried not to laugh. If only she knew…
‘Why would I be fat?’ he asked.
‘Lots of men gain weight after they turn thirty. What are you now? Thirty-five?’
‘Thirty-six. You’ve lost weight.’
‘A little.’
‘You’re still very beautiful.’
Her eyes stabbed his with reproach. ‘Don’t, Gino.’
‘Don’t what?’
‘Don’t sweet-talk me.’
‘You used to like me sweet-talking you.’
‘I used to like you doing a lot of things.’
He wished she hadn’t said that. Her words were sparking memories which would have been better kept buried.
And they in turn sparked something he’d been trying to deny all day, struggled to control ever since he’d asked her to dance. Which was that he still wanted her—despite the years which had passed, despite everything. He wanted to take her upstairs to his hotel room right now and strip her of those sexless clothes, wanted to take down her hair and just take her, as he had ten years ago.
She’d been a virgin back then, a fact he hadn’t realised till it was too late. Her innocence had shocked him at the time, but her passion had quickly banished any qualms.
That passion was still there: he could see it in her blazing blue eyes and flushed cheeks.
And it was still overriding his conscience.
‘Some things don’t change,’ he growled.
‘Everything changes, Gino. Nothing stays the same.’
‘Is that so?’
His hands shifted, one sliding up her spine, the other downward to her tailbone, giving him the leverage to press her close.
As their bodies made more intimate contact a wave of dark desire ripped through Gino, obliterating what little was left of his conscience.
‘This hasn’t changed, beautiful,’ he whispered huskily.
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_b8127042-f5c9-537d-beef-126c4c761d5c)
JORDAN stiffened, then tried to stop dancing altogether. But he would have none of it, keeping her body jammed tight against his as he moved his hips from side to side.
Impossible to ignore his arousal.
Gino was impressively built. Her mind flashed back to the first time he’d made love to her. Or tried to. She’d never forgotten the shocked look on his face when he’d realised she was a virgin. She’d begged him not to stop, and he hadn’t, his initial penetration punching a pained cry from her lips.
She’d gloried in the experience, impatient to do it again as soon as possible. Afterwards he’d run them both a bath and lain her on top of him in the warm water, caressing her body. Then he’d dried her and carried her back to her bed, where he’d made love to her again, not stopping till she’d fallen into a deep sleep.
He’d given her tender body time to recover from his initial onslaught. Next morning, when he’d entered her, she’d welcomed him with a wild, wanton need. She’d climaxed swiftly and noisily.
After that, she’d always come whenever he was inside her.
Feeling his rock-hard flesh pressing into her stomach reminded her of how that felt: Gino being inside her.
Jordan suppressed a groan, burying her head under his chin to hide her flushed face from his eyes.
‘I’m up here for the weekend,’ he murmured, his lips in her hair. ‘I’m staying here at this hotel.’
Jordan’s head jerked back, her eyes disbelieving as she stared up into his darkly handsome face. ‘You’re staying here? At the Regency?’
‘It is fate, is it not?’
Jordan shook her head. ‘I don’t believe in fate. Things are not predestined, Gino. People have free will. And choices.’
‘And what would you choose, Jordan, if I asked you to come up to my room with me?’
Jordan’s lips fell open. The arrogance of him! And the presumption!
But, oh…the passion. It blazed down at her from his beautiful black eyes, reminding her of his extraordinary virility and amazing sexual stamina. When they’d lived together it had been nothing for Gino to make love to her for hours on end, with only the shortest of breaks in between. He’d claimed he couldn’t get enough of her, and his actions had backed up his words.
Gino had never been the first one to go to sleep. She’d been the one who usually pegged out, exhausted but happy.
‘What for, exactly?’ she snapped, even as she quivered inside at the thought of going up to his room with him. ‘An old-times’-sake shag? Sorry, but I don’t do one-night stands, Gino. I never did. You must remember that.’
‘I remember everything about you,’ he said, his voice vibrating with the most seductive emotion. ‘And I’m not after a one-night stand. I want you to stay the whole weekend with me. I also want the opportunity to talk to you. To explain why I didn’t come back for you all those years ago.’
Jordan’s wildly galloping heart skittered to an unsteady halt. ‘You…you wanted to come back for me?’
‘Of course. I loved you, Jordan. Never doubt that.’
The last of Jordan’s resistance began to crumble right then and there.
‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he added. ‘I don’t want to talk tonight. Tonight is for us, Jordan. You and me together again, as we once were. Don’t say no. Say si. Si, Gino. As I taught you all those years ago.’
Jordan’s head whirled. That was another way she’d been different with Gino than with any other man since. The way he’d been able to make her submit to his will. Not like some whipped slave, but willingly and wantonly. She had wallowed in the role of being his woman. Wallowed in his possessiveness and his protectiveness. With him she’d always felt safe and secure, and totally, totally loved.
She’d been devastated when he left, devastated and despairing. That year she’d failed her exams and had to resit.
She hadn’t had another boyfriend during her remaining years at university. Then, when she had eventually started dating again, she’d gone out with sweet, gentle men who were, perhaps, just a little weak. Men she could dominate and dump, once things got too serious.
Because she wasn’t going to marry any of them. How could she, when she didn’t love them?
Then Chad had come into her life. Smiling, charming, successful Chad, who’d impressed her with his intelligence and sophistication.
Sex with him was quite good.
She’d thought she loved him—till he’d proposed and she had suddenly been faced with a lifetime of sleeping with him.
If she were brutally honest, there was something irritatingly clinical about Chad’s lovemaking—as if he was following a textbook on sex. Sometimes she faked her orgasm, so that he wouldn’t ask her if she’d had one.
Gino had never asked her. He’d known she had.
Jordan trembled at the thought of how many times she would climax if she went up to his hotel room with him.
‘Come on,’ he decided for her. ‘Let’s go.’
Taking her arms from around his neck, he grabbed her left hand and began pulling her towards the exit.
‘My things!’ she protested, and indicated the table where, hopefully, her bag and jacket would still be on that chair.
They were.
He scowled as he watched her draw her jacket on. ‘Why do you wear such unflattering clothes?’
Her eyes flicked over his outfit. Tight black jeans, a white T-shirt and a black leather jacket. He’d always been a jeans and T-shirt kind of guy. They suited Gino’s tall, macho body.
‘Female lawyers wear clothes like this to work,’ she said. She didn’t add, Especially ones who looked like her. The law was still a man’s world, no matter what feminists liked to think. Even women clients preferred a male lawyer.
‘You look better in a dress,’ he returned, taking her elbow and steering her towards the exit. ‘Or at least a skirt. You should never wear trousers, Jordan.’
Heat flooded her body as she recalled how, after Gino had been living with her for a while, he’d forbidden her to wear underwear. She’d fought him over that. At first. But he’d managed to convince her, and she’d started going round with nothing on under her clothes. Which was why she’d worn dresses and skirts back then, and not jeans or trousers.
Oh, heavens, she felt hot, so hot.
Thankfully, the air outside the bar was much cooler. Jordan scooped in some calming breaths as Gino urged her along the marble-floored arcade which led to the hotel foyer proper. If she was going to do this she would rather do it with a clear head, not because she was mindlessly turned on.
But it was no use. She was mindlessly turned on.
She tried warning herself that he might have become a heartless womaniser, was just spinning her a line to get her into bed for the night.
But she wasn’t convinced. He’d seemed so sincere just now. Sincere and very passionate.
At the same time Jordan was desperate to find the answers to all those questions about Gino which had plagued her for the last ten years.
He’d promised to explain everything in the morning.
Meanwhile…
It was the meanwhile which was sending her into a spin.
