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Lips attached, they sank entwined to the mossy floor.
A silence punctuated by soft gasps and hoarse gasps pulsed as the trees stood silent witness as they feverishly tore at each other’s clothes until they lay hot bare flesh to hot bare flesh.
Gianfranco covered one hardened nipple with his mouth, causing her slender back to arch as deep darts of pleasure penetrated to the very core of her. He kissed his way down her belly as his fingers explored the soft curls at the apex of her legs before sliding deeper into her.
Feeling as though she were drowning in erotic pleasure, Dervla slid her fingers across the sweat-slick golden contours of his hard, smooth shoulders. ‘Now, please!’ she begged. ‘Oh, my God, Gianfranco, why are you so damned good at this?’ she groaned as he responded willingly to her plea.
‘Look at me!’ he commanded thickly as he filled her, sinking deep into her heat. ‘I want to see your face.’ His own face was flushed, the skin drawn tight against the strong planes and hollows of his bone structure.
Their eyes were sealed as tightly as their bodies as they moved together, both silent but for tortured breathing until a low, almost feral cry of pleasure was torn from Dervla’s lips as the first wave of release hit her.
At almost the same moment she felt him pulse hotly inside her.
Stretched out lazily on the mossy floor, Gianfranco watched, one hand beneath his head, as she began to dress. Arms twisted behind her back, balanced on one leg, Dervla struggled clumsily with the clasp on her bra.
He responded to the wave of tenderness that hit him with his usual mantra of, It’s just lust, a purely sexual thing, and wondered as he rode out the wave how much shelf-life that particular rationalisation had?
‘You could help.’
‘My expertise lies in removing undergarments. Besides, you really don’t need that thing, pretty though it is,’ he conceded. ‘I prefer you free and unfettered, especially under a silk blouse.’
‘You mean I’m flat-chested,’ Dervla snapped, pretending outrage as she tore her blouse from his fingers. Actually marriage to Gianfranco had cured her of any insecurities she had about her body; he enjoyed it and had taught her to do the same.
Gianfranco laughed. ‘Hardly that, cara! You fit in my hands just perfectly,’ he reminded her, extending one hand and flexing his fingers suggestively to demonstrate the fit.
She turned her head quickly, but not before he had seen the hot fiery rush of colour to her cheeks. That she could blush now when he could still taste her on his lips, when he knew every inch of her body better than he knew his own, made him grin. ‘You’re blushing.’
Dervla tossed back her red hair and turned, fastening her shirt as it settled in wild rippling curls around her shoulders. ‘You just like to torment me,’ she charged reproachfully.
His eyes slid to her smooth, high cleavage as he levered himself upright in one fluid motion. With one hand he smoothed back her hair from her face before planting a warm, lingering kiss on her parted lips.
‘It only seems fair, cara,’ he husked, ‘as you torment me.’
It was true, though the urgency of his desire had ebbed, it was never far away when he looked at her or even thought of her. He had never known anything like it.
‘What are you thinking?’ he asked, studying her face with the unnerving intensity that always made her feel he could see into her head and read her thoughts.
Dervla shook her head. ‘I was just thinking …’ She watched through her lashes, her attention drifting as he fastened the belt across his slim hips and began to button his shirt across his flat, muscle-ridged belly. ‘It’s just all this—’
The expressive sweep of her slim arm took in the Tuscan landscape, of rolling hills dotted with olive groves and the sensitively and expensively restored palazzo, which, with the exception of a few years when Gianfranco’s father had lost it in a poker game, had been in his family since the fifteenth century.
A year ago life had been much simpler. She had been a nurse, philosophical about the fact that there was no way she could afford to get on the property ladder in London.
Now she was mistress of this vast estate and several other luxurious homes across Europe including a London Georgian town house complete with the obligatory underground pool and leisure complex, and wife of the powerful enigmatic man who earned the billions for their upkeep.
‘It’s so far away from my old life.’
There had been so many changes in the past year that sometimes when she caught sight of her reflection in a mirror Dervla hardly recognised the woman reflected there, and she wasn’t talking designer outfits!
The changes went much deeper.
But then she hadn’t actually had much choice but to adapt when she’d found herself plunged into a totally alien environment and dramatically out of her comfort zone. She’d had to develop a few new skills to cope.
And she had.
A year ago she would have laughed hysterically at the suggestion that she had the ability to get a children’s hospice—funded by the charitable trust funded by Gianfranco’s financial empire—from the drawing-board stage to bricks-and-mortar reality.
Similarly she would have had a panic attack at the notion that she could attend and, even more scary, host glittering events where the guests could be as diverse as politicians, Hollywood royalty and the real thing—who ever knew there were so many princes in Europe?
Maybe some of Gianfranco’s—not entirely realistic in her view—confidence in her ability to do whatever he threw at her had rubbed off, because she had done both.
And become a stepmother.
A small frown puckered the smooth skin of her brow as her thoughts turned to her stepson, whom she adored.
That might have been the biggest challenge of all if Alberto had displayed even the remotest resentment of her, his new stepmother, or if Gianfranco had made it quite clear on the one occasion she had found herself in the middle of a father-son tussle that when it came to his son he made the decisions.
She had forgotten what the minor disagreement had been about, but not his words when he had referred to the incident when they were in private.
‘There has been just Alberto and me for a long time now … what we have works.’
Dervla’s admiration was sincere. ‘I know you’re a great father. I was only—’
‘I will not have you undermining my authority with my son, Dervla.’
‘I wasn’t trying to—’
He brushed aside her protest with an impatient motion of his hand. ‘Children,’ he told her, apparently unaware of the insult he had offered her, ‘need continuity.’
‘You mean children are permanent and wives are temporary.’
His irritation was written clear in his steely stare as he retorted coldly, ‘If you wish to put it that way.’
She hid her hurt behind aggression. ‘You put it that way.’
His careless shrug made her resentment spill over into an unwise—she knew it the moment it left her lips—reference to his dead first wife.
‘I don’t suppose you told Alberto’s mother it was not for ever when you proposed to her?’
His expression iced over, making him seem austere and distant. ‘My marriage to Sara is not relevant. I did not marry you to give Alberto a mother.’
‘I sometimes wonder why you married me at all,’ she slung back childishly.
The white-hot blaze in his eyes as he grabbed her by the shoulders and dragged her up against his long, lean body made her knees fold as he gave his driven response to her question.
‘I married you because you wouldn’t be my mistress, because I couldn’t think straight without you in my bed and because I will not share you with another man.’
No mention of love, but he kissed her and she told herself she didn’t care. About three seconds later she stopped thinking entirely.
Dervla sighed. It was always that way the moment Gianfranco touched her: her principles and pride vaporised. Which was why she had ended up married to a man who never even pretended he loved her, though for one split second when he had proposed her mind had made that understandable assumption.
‘But you barely know me!’ she protested. ‘It takes time to fall in love, Gianfranco and—’ She stopped, the colour seeping from her face as the truth—as she saw it then—hit her.
Time had not the first thing to do with falling in love. And for some people it actually didn’t take long at all … in her case it had taken about a second, and now it seemed that amazingly it had been the same for Gianfranco …? Only he had had the sense to recognise it.
She lifted her dazed eyes to his lean, devastatingly handsome face and thought, I really do love you. A shuddering sigh left her parted lips; a smile of wondering joy spread across her face.
Gianfranco, she saw, was smiling too, only his smile twisted his mobile lips into a cynical grimace and left his incredible eyes unusually cold.
‘I am not looking for love.’
Her face remained frozen in the smile, but the light had gone out of her eyes as he expanded on the theme.
‘If such a thing actually exists …?’
‘You don’t think so, I take it.’
One dark brow moved in the direction of his hairline and he sketched a sardonic smile. ‘Outside fairy tales? Do you know how many marriages actually last more than a few years?’
‘So how long do you propose our—our hypothetical marriage will last?’
‘You cannot fix a specific time when there are so many unknown variables.’
God, and they say romance is dead! ‘So when you say for better or worse, what you actually mean is until the gloss wears off or something better comes along?’
‘You think it’s somehow more courageous and noble to stay in a marriage because of a sense of obligation?’ Lip curled, he shook his head. ‘That’s not nobility. At best it’s habit, at worst it’s laziness and fear. I’m being a realist. You might prefer me to trot out the clichés about us being fated to be together through eternity?’
‘People are. My parents had been married thirty-five years when they were killed.’
‘An accident?’
‘The coach they were travelling in went across the central reservation of the motorway and hit a lorry coming in the opposite direction. Ten people were killed, including my parents.’
‘You were how old?’
‘Eighteen, in my first year of nurse training.”
‘I am sorry, and I am glad your parents had a happy marriage, but I cannot see into the future. I have no idea what I will feel in five, ten years’ time, but I know what I feel now.
‘Now,’ he told her, in a voice that made every single nerve ending in her body sigh, ‘I want you.’
That had been a year ago and he still wanted her, and any future plans he spoke of included her.
What are you going to do when he doesn’t and they don’t?
Fear tightened and clenched inside her and with a small cry she turned and buried her head in Gianfranco’s chest. ‘I’m happy!’ she declared defiantly.
Startled by her abrupt action, Gianfranco stared down for a moment at the top of her head before lifting a hand to stroke a fiery curl, stretching it and then letting it spring back softly into shape.
‘Happy?’
Dervla felt his hands on her shoulders and burrowed deeper into him, her eyes closed, feeling the solid warmth of his lean, hard male body seep into her as his arms folded across her ribcage.
‘Yes, I’m happy.’
Everyone had a different recipe for happiness, but she knew that hers had one vital ingredient: Gianfranco.
So things might not be perfect, the alternative was no Gianfranco. It was an alternative she could not bring herself to contemplate; it was the reason she had said yes when he proposed.
Gianfranco prised her face from his shirt. One big hand framed the side of her face, the other sliding into the lush silky curls on her nape to cradle her skull as he scanned her face.
An image superimposed itself in his head of Dervla’s face when she had told him that she couldn’t marry him because she wasn’t able to have children.
Dio mio, I’m about as sensitive as that stone, he thought, kicking a wedged rock free with the toe of his shoe.
How, he asked himself, did you expect her to feel, when you have her spend the entire weekend with a heavily pregnant woman who babbles incessantly about babies? Of course she cared more than she pretended.
Dervla had been up front about it from the beginning.
He had not been so honest in his response.
He had seen the gratitude shining in her eyes when he had promised her that her inability to conceive made no difference to him; she clearly hadn’t believed a word he said, but he hadn’t made any real push to dissuade her from her clear belief in his nobility.
Contrary to what she thought, there was no sacrifice on his part; when she had told him of this tragedy in her life his reaction had been relief!
Relief he would never now need to have that awkward conversation—the one where he would have to dredge up his past mistakes.
‘Happy? So that,’ he teased lightly as he blotted with his thumb the sparkling tear that was sliding down her cheek, ‘is a tear of joy?’
Dervla didn’t respond to his comment. Instead she tilted her head and asked, ‘Are you happy, Gianfranco?’
‘What is happy?’
She saw the trace of irritation in his face at the question, and thought, If you were happy you wouldn’t need to ask.
‘I would be happier,’ he said, taking her hand, ‘if Carla decides to go home this evening.’
CHAPTER TWO
GIANFRANCO’S wish was not granted.
When they got back to the house Carla, wearing a swimsuit encrusted with sequins and quite obviously designed more for displaying her perfect body beside a pool than swimming in, asked Gianfranco if she could beg a seat in his helicopter the next morning.
‘I thought you had things to get back to.’
‘No, I’m all yours,’ the older woman responded, apparently oblivious to the strong hint. ‘And the staff are back so you won’t need to vanish into the kitchen. You’re both so eccentric,’ she murmured, shaking her head before pleading with a pretty smile for Gianfranco to apply some sunscreen to her back.
Dervla stiffened, her hands balling instinctively into fists as an image of Gianfranco’s hands on the other woman’s warm, smooth skin formed in her head.
