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What, and let her loose to be the target of the first unscrupulous bastard with slick patter and a hard-luck story? His jaw tautened as, with an aggressive snort of disgust, he treated the ridiculous idea with the contempt it deserved.
At least with him she was safe.
The problem was she was so damned giving.
And she had given it all to him, held nothing back.
He would never forget that moment when he had realised he had seduced a virgin.
Sure, you were so traumatised you only paused to catch your breath before trying to do it again!
Ignoring the sardonic interjection of the critical voice in his head, Gianfranco recalled the primitive surge of male satisfaction tinged by a tenderness that had followed his initial blank shock.
When he had held her in his arms and told her that the possibility that she would be a virgin had never even crossed his mind she had confirmed her naivety by saying with a rueful grimace, ‘You noticed, then. I was wondering if you would.’
‘How is this possible? You are twenty-six. I thought I was a late starter,’ he muttered under his breath.
With feline grace that fascinated him, she rolled over and snuggled with a very un-virginlike lack of self-consciousness up to him. She trailed a finger down his sweat-slick hair-roughened chest, insinuating the feminine curve of her hip into the hard angle of his as she threw one slim thigh across his legs.
‘So how old were you?’ she asked, adding with a sigh of voluptuous pleasure and a sexy shimmy of her soft body against his, ‘God, this is good and you are totally and absolutely beautiful.’ Her exuberance was contagious.
‘Are you going to fall asleep?’
‘No, I am not going to fall asleep,’ he promised, laughing.
He had never associated laughter with sex before, but then it was not his habit to indulge in teasing banter or snuggling in the post-coital aftermath.
The romantic boy in him was long dead. For him sex was about satisfying a mutual primal need. Modern society felt the need to dress it up and talk of spiritual, emotional connections, but he did not buy into the self-deception.
And if on occasion, no matter how great the sex had been, he was left with a vague feeling of dissatisfaction, not being a man inclined towards introspection, he didn’t analyse it or feel he was missing out on anything.
‘So how old were you?’ she persisted.
‘You seem fascinated by my sexual history.’
Tongue caught between her teeth, she trailed a finger down his chest, her green eyes teasing him from under the flirtatious sweep of her lashes. It amused him to see her discovering the power of her female sexuality and taking such obvious delight from it—so was he!
Her questing hand slid lower and she gave a deliciously throaty chuckle as he shuddered, his body stirring lustfully.
‘I’m fascinated by lots of things about you,’ she admitted. ‘But I did have you down as a very early starter.’
Very conscious of the small hand that now rested palm down on the flat of his belly, he retorted, ‘I was not twenty-six.’ He avoided whenever possible thinking of his idealistic nineteen-year-old self.
‘How is it possible that a woman who looks like you has never had a lover?’
‘Thank you. That’s a very nice thing to say. You’ve got lovely manners.’
‘Manners? Dio, you say the oddest things. It’s not nice; it is a fact—you are beautiful.’ He caught her softly rounded chin in his hand and tilted her heart-shaped face up to him and looked deep into her emerald eyes.
Dervla didn’t look away, but looked steadily back at him, though there was a touch of shyness in her direct gaze. When he touched his thumb to her lips, still swollen from his kisses, and traced the cushiony softness, her lashes had swept downwards, brushing against her smooth flushed cheeks.
He kissed the delicate blue-veined eyelids and murmured, ‘Very beautiful and desirable. I thought so from the moment I saw you.’
Her eyelashes lifted and there was a sparkle of teasing wickedness in her eyes. ‘Do you want to know what I thought when I first saw you?’ Before he could respond she shook her head and with a rueful grimace said, ‘On second thoughts, don’t ask. It wasn’t very professional.’
He watched her expression grow sober, a furrow appearing between her feathery brows as she touched the sutures that had closed the healing wound that lay close to the hairline at his right temple and ended at his jaw.
He caught her hand and raised it to his lips.
‘Come to think of it, this isn’t very professional,’ she said huskily as she curled her fingers around his jaw. He watched the clear green of her marvellous eyes cloud as, with a distracted expression, she began to stroke her thumb across the light dusting of stubble on his cheek.
‘But what you lacked in expertise you made up for in enthusiasm.’
It took her a second before she digested his comment; in the next second her eyes widened as she loosed an indignant, ‘You know what I mean!’ before she rolled away from him and in one seamless motion pulled herself into a sitting position. Then, balancing on her heels, she lobbed a pillow at his chest.
Gianfranco had been too absorbed by the gentle and incredibly erotic quiver of her small pink-tipped breasts to block the missile.
Pleased that he had succeeded in driving the self-recriminatory frown from her face, he grinned, removed the second weapon from her hands and pushed her back against the mattress. Supported above her by one hand, he curved the other over her delectable bottom. As he dragged her to him he heard her sharp intake of breath and felt the vibration as the husky little whimper got trapped in her throat.
Looking into her eyes, he saw them dilate dramatically until just a thin ring of green remained. She aroused a hunger in him that threatened the control he prided himself on.
‘What you need, cara, is practice and lots of it.’
‘Which you will provide?’ Before he could assure her of his total willingness to do so she suddenly groaned. ‘No, this is all wrong!’
‘Wrong?’ It felt pretty right to him. Frustration clawed at his belly.
‘Patients are vulnerable,’ she explained solemnly. ‘Sometimes they get close to the people caring for them, imagine they have feelings.’ Her eyes slid from his. ‘It’s a well-documented fact. To take advantage of someone vulnerable is despicable … and I can’t even claim I didn’t know what I was doing. I knew exactly what I was doing.’
It took him a few seconds to interpret her convoluted and earnest explanation.
‘You think you are taking advantage of me?’ He had to bite back the laughter because she clearly took this very seriously. ‘If anyone could be accused of taking advantage it should be me. You were the virgin.’ She brushed aside the reminder with a wave of her hand. ‘And today you were upset because you lost your patient.’
‘I’m a nurse and I work on a unit where people are very ill, patients die.’
‘And you stay objective—you expect me to believe that?’ he asked incredulously. ‘I’ve watched you.’ He actually couldn’t take his eyes off her. ‘You ooze empathy.’
She gave him a quizzical look. ‘Is that a bad thing?’
‘Not for the lonely old man you visited on your day off.’
‘Mr Chambers had no family here. His daughter had emigrated, she was coming and—’
‘You do not need to explain your actions to me, Dervla. I am not your patient.’
‘No, but your son is.’
‘Not for much longer.’ If Alberto threw off the infection that had slightly delayed his progress, the medics said he ought to be fit enough to be transferred to a hospital within half an hour’s drive from their Florence home to convalesce.
She nodded. ‘You’ll be home soon.’
He watched as without warning tears started to leak from Dervla’s glorious eyes. ‘My God,’ she groaned, flashing him a mortified look as she brushed them away. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Why are you crying, Dervla?’ he asked, sitting upright.
Normally tears were his cue for recalling he needed to be somewhere else. Gianfranco had a cynical take on female tears, being of the opinion they were more to do with manipulation than sentiment.
Only it was fast dawning on him that unlike other lovers in his past, this redhead didn’t know the first thing about manipulation or, for that matter, self-preservation.
His hands clenched into fists as he thought of her walking like an innocent lamb into the clutches of some bastard who would take advantage of that trusting nature.
Some might say she already has. Gianfranco dismissed the thought. Men took advantage of a woman when they pretended to feel something they didn’t. He did not play those games.
‘I’m not. I don’t cry. Oh, God!’ she snapped, rounding on him angrily. ‘Can’t a girl sniff without a full-scale interrogation?’
‘You’re upset and I want to know why.’ He had felt a slight twinge of unease, recognising that he genuinely did want to know.
In previous relationships the most personal details he had felt it necessary to learn about the women in his life were their preferences in designer labels. He was not an ungenerous lover, but he was not one who was interested in emotionally high-maintenance women.
‘Are you regretting this?’
‘Regretting?’ she echoed, looking startled by the suggestion and then wryly amused as she told him, ‘Nothing could be farther from the truth.’
He was relieved but perplexed by the odd inflection in her voice. ‘Then why …?’
She shook her head mutely and rolled away, presenting him with her slim bare back. A hand on her shoulder, he pulled her back. ‘Look at me!’ he commanded.
After a moment she did. Their eyes meshed and the silence stretched until a small choking sound escaped her throat. In one single fluid motion she was on her feet at the side of the bed, red hair falling in a silken skein around her shoulders. She seemed oblivious to her nakedness as she stood there literally quivering, her pale skin glowing with an opalescent sheen.
Gianfranco had known at that moment that the image of her standing there would always remain in his memory.
‘I was trying very hard to be grown up about this, but if you want to know, fine!’ She flung up her arms, causing her small pink-tipped breasts to bounce in a way that sent a fresh distracting stab of lust slamming through Gianfranco’s aroused body.
‘I was crying because I’ll miss you when you go back home.’ She screwed her eyes tight shut and shook her head before fixing him with a challenging glare. ‘And before you say it, yes, I do know how stupid that sounds and how ludicrous I’m being. I barely even know you. We have nothing in common and—’
‘You’ll miss me?’ He watched as dull colour ran up under her fair skin as she reached for a quilt that had fallen to the ground and wrapped it around herself.
‘I really don’t know what I’m saying. This has been a pretty emotional day.’
Was she referring to losing the patient she had cared for or losing her virginity? He patted the bed. It was an invitation she accepted after a moment, though to his regret the quilt stayed in place as she sat primly on the edge of the bed.
‘Come with me,’ he heard himself say.
Her expression mirrored the incomprehension he was feeling. ‘Come …?’
‘Come with us when we go back to Italy.’
‘That’s very nice of you, but I don’t have any annual leave left this year.’
‘For the record, Dervla, I am not a nice man, and I’m not talking about taking a vacation. You’d like Italy.’
‘Live there, you mean?’
‘Why not?’
‘A hundred why nots,’ she retorted, trying to laugh but sounding strained as she reminded him, ‘My work is here, Gianfranco.’
‘There are hospitals in Italy.’
‘I don’t speak Italian, it takes time to learn a language and I need to earn a living … God, will you listen to me?’ she exclaimed, clapping a hand to her head and rolling her eyes. ‘I sound as though I’m actually considering it.’
‘You don’t need to worry about earning a living straight away—I’m not exactly a poor man.’
Beside him she stiffened. ‘You’re suggesting I should pack in my job, leave my friends and come with you to Italy as your mistress?’
‘Not mistress precisely,’ he admitted.
But now that he thought about it he could see the very definite advantages to this plan. It wasn’t until she turned her head and he saw her expression that it dawned on him that Dervla was not warmed to the idea.
He continued to study her and thought about the women, he could think of several, who might manage to simulate a little enthusiasm at the prospect of the lap of luxury as his mistress.
‘Well, what else would you call a woman when a man pays her bills in return, of course, for certain favours?’ she enquired with withering contempt. Her bosom heaved as she choked. ‘I’ve never been so insulted in my life!’
Her anger seemed totally inexplicable to Gianfranco. ‘You are insulted?’
He wondered whether to inform her that the post that apparently filled her with such disgust was one that any number of women had angled for over the years.
‘Damn right,’ she ground through clenched teeth. ‘Do I seem to you like the sort of woman who would make herself reliant on a man? A woman who would give up her independence? Waiting until I’m twenty-six to discover sex might in retrospect make me a fool, but not that much of a fool.’
‘So is that it? Now that you have discovered sex, you are anxious to experiment.’ An image of the faceless men who would continue the education he had begun flashed into his head. The throbbing in his temples became a pulsating thud.
After staring at him in stunned silence for a moment, she threw back her head and laughed. Her eyes were sparkling with anger as she said in a flat little voice, ‘And I have you to thank for my sexual liberation.’
‘Do not confuse promiscuity with liberation,’ he counselled severely, still seeing that line of predatory faceless males.
‘You’re accusing me of being promiscuous? That’s rich! That really is rich! The way I hear, you change women the same way a normal man changes his shirt. If you were a woman and not filthy rich people would call you some very nasty names. And they might be right!’
‘Dio mio!’ he breathed wrathfully. The women he took to his bed were experts at pleasing a man; they did not go out of their way to insult him.
It turned out she hadn’t finished with him yet.
‘You know, you’re the sort of man who can’t talk about his feelings and thinks it’s a sign of strength.’
‘Suddenly you know an awful lot about men—and me,’ he observed grimly.
She glared at him through shimmering green eyes and tossed her head contemptuously. ‘I know enough about you to know I never want to see you again.’ Snatching up her scattered clothes, she ran from the room.
He told himself that the turn of events, while frustrating, was for the best in the long run. Dervla Smith was too high maintenance. He threw aside the covers and vaulted to his feet, his toe caught in the lacy strap of her bra.
