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‘Dare I ask what you were thinking at the time?’ he queried as he rolled over to face her.
‘No.’
His dark eyes glittered as his hungry gaze swept over her body, and Bella resisted the momentary urge to cover her nakedness. A bit late to resort to shy. Besides, she liked showing off her body to Sergio; liked the way he looked at it. How amazing was that?
‘I could make you tell me,’ he threatened. ‘I could tickle you till you confess.’
Her eyebrows lifted in a saucy gesture. ‘And there I was, thinking you meant to do something seriously naughty to me.’
Now his eyebrows lifted. ‘You’re into seriously naughty, are you?’
Bella realised at that moment that her new boldness was still somewhat shaky. She didn’t want Sergio thinking she wanted him to do kinky things.
‘Not at all!’ she said, trying not to panic.
‘What, then?’
‘Nothing! I...I was just flirting with you. I didn’t have anything specific in mind.’
‘You mean you don’t want me to tie you to the bedposts and torture you in all sorts of erotic ways till you blurt out all your secret fetishes?’
Bella’s eyes blinked wide when the thought of his doing just that sent a wave of dizzying excitement all through her.
‘No?’ he said, perhaps interpreting her round-eyed gaze as shock. Which was partly true. She was shocked at how much she wanted him to do exactly that. Shocked too that he would suggest such a thing. Clearly, he was even more of a bad boy than she’d realised earlier. Either that, or maybe all men were bad boys when it came to sex. Bella realised she had to take control of the situation—and her own surprisingly lust-filled self—or Sergio might get carried away with what she would allow. She didn’t want him believing she was up for anything during her stay here with him.
‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘For your information, dear Sergio, I don’t have any secret fetishes. Neither am I into seriously naughty. Now I need to go to the bathroom. And then I need some food.’
‘Fair enough,’ he said, his nonchalant tone bringing some welcome relief. ‘I’ll order us a couple of pizzas. You do like pizzas, don’t you?’ he added with a quirk of his mouth.
Her chin lifted as it did whenever she thought someone was making fun of her.
‘I do. If it’s a good pizza.’
‘Sweetheart, this is Italy. Of course it’ll be good pizza.’
Bella flinched at his calling her sweetheart like that. She hated the way men used generic terms for women. She especially hated being called sweetheart and babe. But to take him to task on it seemed petty and premature.
Pursing her lips tightly together, she swung her feet over the side of the bed and was about to stand up when some of her old shyness unexpectedly returned. The thought of walking naked across the room to the bathroom suddenly felt humiliating. She kept picturing him staring at her bare bottom and thinking all sorts of kinky things.
In the end, she squared her shoulders, straightened her spine, stood up and began to slowly cross the marble floor, hotly aware of the way her bottom and hips moved with each step.
His sexy whistle sent a fierce flush to her face. Flustered yet flattered at the same time, she threw what was hopefully a haughty glare over her shoulder at him.
‘I’m beginning to think you’re no gentleman, after all,’ she said.
He just laughed, leaving her no option but to continue on her way whilst valiantly ignoring the memory of the way his eyes were glued to her bottom. And they were, Bella having noted the direction of his gaze when she’d glanced back at him.
But it was no walk of shame in the end. By the time she closed the bathroom door behind her Bella was actually smiling. If felt good to be desired by Sergio. In fact it felt fantastic.
There was a lot to be said for a friends with benefits fling, Bella decided. The month ahead promised to be the best holiday she’d ever had, a wonderful combination of the most beautiful setting, wonderfully warm weather and the best sex she’d ever had.
The last bit made her laugh, since she hardly had a history of even good sex. If she was brutally honest, her lack of libido over the years had troubled Bella for some time. Had made her feel such a failure in that part of her life. Her lack of sexual confidence was why she’d never been a flirt, only the most persistent admirer getting to first base with her. So why had her libido come to life now? she wondered. And why with Sergio?
All she could think was maybe she was a late bloomer in the sexual sense. She had been late into puberty, never being boy mad as a teenager like other girls. Or maybe it had something to do with Sergio himself. Though what, she couldn’t fathom. Yes, he had a great body. And yes, he was also a great lover. But her other boyfriends had all been good-looking men too, as well as very experienced where the ladies were concerned, not to mention way more charming and complimentary in their manner to her. Bella still hadn’t forgotten how Sergio had called her too thin. Though he’d also called her beautiful when he’d been making love to her, hadn’t he?
‘Oh, whatever,’ she muttered irritably as she walked over and turned on the taps in the shower.
There really was no point trying to work out such a difficult conundrum. The wonderful reality was that, at last, she’d responded to a man like a normal woman. At last, she’d discovered orgasms. There would be no more boyfriends telling her she was boring in bed. No more believing that she needed to be madly in love to have a satisfying sex life either.
Sergio had shown her that that was a total fallacy, a romantic fantasy. After all, she wasn’t in love with him any more than he was in love with her. How liberating was that?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#u05dafb25-506a-5672-8213-7d5e994377c5)
‘THIS PIZZA IS sinfully yummy,’ Bella mumbled with her mouth half full.
‘Sì,’ Sergio replied, and refilled her glass with the bottle of champagne he’d opened in celebration of the way things were going between them.
Her singing in the shower had filled him with a joy that might have troubled him, if it had been any other woman singing in his shower. But this was Bella, the woman who had sexually tormented him for years. And now she was here, in his home and in his bed. Sergio was way too enamoured of her glorious beauty, too bewitched by her sex appeal, too thrilled with having succeeded in her seduction, to dig deeper into his emotions.
They were sitting at a table on the balcony, Bella back in her PJs, Sergio having dragged on a pair of jeans, not needing to play the exhibitionist any longer. She’d already seen what he had to offer. Had experienced it up close and personal. She’d liked it too. Liked it a lot, if he were any judge.
She swallowed, then smiled over at him. ‘Do you know that’s the first Italian word you’ve used since I arrived? You’ve totally lost your accent, do you know that? Not that it was ever strong. Even when you first came to live with us in Sydney, you didn’t talk like your father did.’
‘That’s because I was sent to an English boarding school when I was eight.’
‘I vaguely recall you telling me that. Did you like it there?’
‘Hated it. I was very happy when our parents married and my father sent for me to come live with him and go to school in Sydney.’ Happy till he’d realised that Dolores didn’t really love his father. Or him. Though she’d pretended to. Sergio had always been good at spotting a fake. If it hadn’t been for Bella’s vivacious company, he would have been miserable. His schooling in Sydney had been barely tolerable, with his never being a popular boy.
‘You sounded like a real Aussie for a while,’ she said, smiling at the memory. ‘Till your dad sent you off to university in Rome and you came back sounding all Italian.’
‘Did I? I didn’t notice.’
‘And now you sound totally English.’
Sergio shrugged. ‘Well, I have lived in England for the last eleven years.’
Bella put down the remains of her slice of pizza. ‘Doing what, Sergio?’
Before he could think better of it, Sergio started telling her all about his life since their parents’ divorce, beginning right back at his first year in Oxford where at last he’d found true male friendship with Alex and Jeremy. He told her all about them, even telling her about their formation of the Bachelors’ Club. Admittedly, at the last second, he did have the foresight to let Bella think that their vow to remain bachelors and become billionaires didn’t have any age deadline. He wasn’t about to give her any inkling that, shortly, he would be looking for a wife.
He then went on to explain how he and his two best friends first got into the wine-bar business, relating that one day, shortly after they’d formed the Bachelors’ Club, he and Alex had spotted a dilapidated old bar for sale not far from the Oxford campus. They’d told Jeremy about it that evening, insisting it could be turned into a good business with the right décor and the right wine to appeal to the mainly student clientele. They’d raved about its location, being situated near the university, and they’d known Jeremy had come into a substantial inheritance from his grandmother’s estate, and it wasn’t long before they made a deal with him that they would do all the physical work if he put up the money.
‘Alex and I did all the refurbishing ourselves,’ Sergio told Bella. ‘We sanded and varnished the wooden floors and painted all the walls and ceiling black.’ He laughed at this memory. ‘We’d got a great special from a local paint shop on black paint. Then we hung huge posters of grapes and vineyards on the walls and covered the bar stools in a dark purple vinyl. We got a special on that too. Oh, and we got rid of the mirrors behind the bar. We thought they were too in your face. After that, we hunted the charity shops and flea markets for lounge furniture and coffee tables at reasonable prices and in reasonable condition. We figured our patrons would like somewhere they could relax, or study on their laptops whilst drinking our very affordable wine. The lighting we kept low, mostly with lamps and a few ceiling lights over the bar area. Then we hired the prettiest girls as staff, but dressed them in simple black skirts and white blouses. Nothing too sexy.’ He grinned at Bella. ‘As I said, they were very pretty girls.’
At this point in his story Sergio realised that Bella was staring at him. No, frowning at him.
‘What?’ he said.
‘But I’ve been to a wine bar that looks just like that. And it wasn’t in Oxford. It was in New York, in a street just off Broadway. It’s not far from where I live. It’s called Wild Over Wine, but everyone calls it the—’
‘WOW bar,’ Sergio finished for her. ‘Yes. There’s a couple of them in New York now.’
Bella’s face could not have been more astonished. ‘You own them?’
‘No. The Wild Over Wine bars are now a highly successful franchise. After the success of our first bar, we bought another, then another. Always near a university at first, but in the end anywhere which had a good location. Eventually, things got too much for us to handle, despite Jeremy having finally come on board as our chief financial officer. Anyway, I got this bright idea to start up a franchise. And it took off. Soon there were WOW bars all over Great Britain and even some in Australia and New Zealand, thanks to Alex. I did tell you Alex was Australian, didn’t I?’
Bella nodded.
‘Brilliant salesman. Brilliant all round, actually. Anyway, recently the franchise started creeping into America, with considerable success, I might add.’
‘I can imagine. I loved the one I went into. It had a highly individual ambience with its black walls and comfy furniture. But I wouldn’t have said the wine was all that cheap.’
‘Yes, well, we did change our ideas on that in the end. You can still buy cheap wine at WOW bars if that’s all you can afford, but we were forced to also cater for well-heeled clients whose palates required something better. Oh, and we changed the background music to classical. No royalty paying on most classical music,’ he added laughingly.
‘Heavens!’ Bella exclaimed. ‘I would never have guessed you would become a successful businessman. I always imagined you as some kind of academic.’
Sergio tried not to be offended. He had been a bit of a nerd as a teenager, always with his head in a book.
‘Well, I was never unsure of your career path,’ he pointed out. ‘From the time you were just a kid you were destined for fame and fortune in the music world. All your many and various successes have never surprised me.’
She actually looked a little embarrassed by his compliments.
‘That’s sweet of you to say so, Sergio, but, to be honest, fame and fortune isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. When I’m doing a musical on stage, I work terribly long hours. It can be exhausting, and, quite frankly, rather lonely. I don’t always have time for a social life, or proper relationships.’ She sighed a sigh that carried a wealth of irony, her blue eyes darkening as she picked up her champagne and took a deep swallow. ‘I know you probably think I’ve had heaps of affairs. But that’s far from the truth. In the last decade I’ve only had three serious relationships, all with men best forgotten.’
Sergio didn’t know what to say, her revelation bringing a mixture of surprise and scepticism. Which were the three? The French actor had to be one. And definitely that Russian fellow. Which left a toss-up between the Brazilian polo player and the American rock star. If she was to be believed, that was. Yet why would she lie to him? What motive could she possibly have?
‘I did read about your dating Chuck Richards at one stage,’ he said at last, trying to sound offhand and not accusatory.
‘Good God, no. I never dated that creep. Unfortunately, my publicist at the time thought it was good for my career for my name to be connected in the media with high-profile celebrities. At the time Chuck was all the rage. I was talked into accompanying him to the Aria awards that year, oblivious of the fact that he was a cocaine addict. I had to fight him off in the limo all the way back to my hotel. The guy was an octopus. I told him what I thought of him when I could finally get out, but of course it was reported in the papers as a lovers’ spat. Something Chuck didn’t deny. He made it sound like we’d been secretly seeing each other for weeks. I fired that publicist, but the next one I hired wasn’t much better.’
‘Why have one, then?’ Sergio asked.
Bella shrugged. ‘It’s the way the world works in America. You aren’t anyone in show business if you don’t have a manager and a publicist and a stylist. I even have a Hollywood agent.’
‘You’re going into movies next?’ Was she mad? She was already suffering from burnout.
‘Maybe. If the right movie comes along.’
‘It’s a mistake to have too many fingers in too many pies, Bella,’ Sergio advised, feeling genuinely worried for her. ‘I found that out myself this last year. With my father gone, I felt I should come back to Milan to try to rescue the family business, which was close to bankruptcy. Not out of some silly male pride, but because lots of families rely on that business for their living. Times are just as tough economically in Italy as they are all over the world. Anyway, I knew I couldn’t do that and manage the franchise as well. One of them had to go. I couldn’t do both.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘I talked it over with Alex and Jeremy and, with their approval, I sold the franchise, along with the wine bars we actually owned.’
‘I hope you got a good price.’
He grinned. ‘Let’s just say the main goal of the Bachelors’ Club was instantly achieved.’
‘You all became billionaires?’
‘We did indeed.’ No point in hiding the fact. After all, he didn’t need to use money as a lever to seduce her. She was already well and truly seduced.
‘But that’s marvellous! Oh, you are a clever boy. Now all you have to do is save the family business.’
‘Yes,’ he said, doing his best not to look smug. ‘Unfortunately, that’s going to be a tall order. But I’ll give it my best shot.’
‘I’m sure you will. So you’re going to be living here in future?’
‘Only at weekends. The family owns a town house in Milan where I’ll stay during the week.’
‘I see.’ She took the last bite of her pizza, her expression thoughtful. ‘You say family, Sergio, but there’s only you now. Hardly a family. Don’t you want to get married and have children one day? Surely you don’t intend to stay a bachelor for ever!’
Sergio could see that he’d backed himself into a corner with his earlier lie. But he really didn’t want her to know about his plan to look for a wife soon. It would make their affair seem...callous. Which, of course, it was.
Any guilt he felt was quickly dismissed, however. Why should he feel guilty? She was having a good time, wasn’t she? And he was getting what he’d always wanted.
‘I’m rather obsessive when I am faced with a challenge,’ he confessed. ‘I won’t have time for a wife and children till the family business is making a profit, which could take years. Besides, I’m only thirty-four. I have plenty of time yet to get married.’
Bella pulled a face. ‘Wish I could say the same. Women don’t have all the time in the world if they want children. I turned thirty last month. My biological clock is ticking.’
Sergio suppressed the crazy urge to suggest he would give her a child, if she desperately wanted one. ‘Come now, Bella,’ he said, ‘from the sounds of things you hardly have time to have sex, let alone children.’
‘True,’ she said, then laughed, her eyes sparkling as she looked over the table at him. ‘Till today, that is. I still can’t believe how great it was between us. I mean...it was amazing!’
Sergio could not believe how swiftly his mind switched from having a simple chat with Bella to wanting to have sex with her again, his desire as strong as ever. He’d been right in his original assessment that it would take at least a month of having her before he could move on with his life. She was like a disease, one that he had no antibiotics for. Only time would make him immune to this power she had over him.
Thankfully, she didn’t know she possessed such power; didn’t know how much he wanted her.
He was just a friend with benefits.
‘I agree,’ he said. ‘So now that you’ve had some decent food, do you fancy trying another of Mother Nature’s sleeping pills?’
Her eyes rounded a little but he could see she was as eager as he was. ‘You’re not too tired?’ she asked.
He had to smile. ‘Not yet,’ he said, then swallowed the last of his wine. She had no idea, did she? Which was exactly what he wanted. ‘Shall we try your room this time?’ he suggested casually. ‘That way you won’t have to answer any awkward questions when Maria finds your bed unused tomorrow.’
‘Oh, God,’ she said, perplexing him with a sudden blush. ‘I’d forgotten about what Maria might think.’
Sergio shook his head at her. Women, he’d found over the years, were often complex, contradictory creatures. They often said one thing and meant another. He didn’t want to even try to understand Bella at this moment. He just wanted to have sex with her. Over and over and over.
‘Let me worry about Maria,’ he said as he stood up and held out his hand towards her. ‘All you have to do tonight is enjoy the benefits of our friendship.’
He loved the way her eyes dilated as she put her hand in his; loved the evidence of her own desire. This time, he thought rather ruthlessly as he drew her to her feet, he would insist she be on top, but only after she’d pleasured him with that luscious mouth of hers. Tonight, he wanted to watch her face as she came; wanted to feel her coming apart whilst he was buried deep inside her; wanted to witness her totally losing control.
Only then would he let himself go. Only then.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#u05dafb25-506a-5672-8213-7d5e994377c5)
