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His eyes fell away from hers. ‘Yes…’he said, with a slight frown pleating his brow. ‘I imagine they do.’
Scarlett picked up her glass and took a tiny sip. ‘Will they come out to visit you while you’re here in Australia?’ she asked.
‘They have talked about it once or twice, but nothing has been confirmed.’
‘Do you have a photograph of them?’ she asked.
His eyes were shadowed as they met hers. ‘No, I do not.’
‘Are you close to them?’
‘Yes and no.’
‘What does that mean?’ she asked.
He let out a frustrated sigh. ‘Look, my parents do not have a particularly happy marriage. I do not spend much time with them for the simple reason I do not like hearing them bicker with each other all the time. It grates on me.’
‘Why don’t they get divorced?’
‘They do not believe in divorce.’
‘How ironic,’ she said with an ironic twist to her mouth, ‘That you—their only son—doesn’t believe in marriage.’
‘It is not that I have anything against marriage, Scarlett. I know of several very happy marriages where both parties love and respect each other.’
‘But you don’t want that for yourself.’
‘No.’
Scarlett let her gaze fall away from the determined depths of his. ‘I told you four years ago you’ll end up a lonely old man.’
‘I am prepared to risk a bit of late-life loneliness to have my freedom now.’
She brought her eyes back to his. ‘So you go from one relationship to the other, a month with one woman, a week or two with another? That’s such a shallow way to live.’
‘You are entitled to your opinion, but it is not the way I see things.’
She threw him a disgusted look and said, ‘Go on, tell me—what’s the longest relationship you’ve ever had?’
His gaze meshed with hers for several heart-chugging seconds. The silence was so intense, Scarlett could hear the sound of her own breathing.
‘It was the one I had with you, cara,’ he said with a little smile. ‘Three months, two days and nine-and-a-half hours.’
Scarlett’s mouth went completely dry. ‘You…you counted the days and hours?’
She wasn’t completely sure, but she thought his crooked smile contained a hint of sadness. ‘I missed you after you had gone,’ he said. ‘I was angry at first. Angry for days, weeks even, but then I kept finding things you had left behind—an earring or a little souvenir you had bought, and forgotten to put away with the rest of your things.’
She ran her tongue over her lips. ‘What did you do with them?’
‘I kept them.’
She frowned at him as he rose from the table. ‘But…but why?’
He came around to help her to her feet, his fingers warm and vibrant on the bare skin of her arms. ‘Do you know, that to this day I am still not sure,’ he said, turning her to face him, his hands going to her waist, his fathomless gaze holding hers. ‘Perhaps I always hoped we would see each other again.’
Scarlett felt her breath catch like a tiny fish-hook at the back of her throat. ‘Did-did you feel anything for me back then, Alessandro, anything at all other than desire?’
He lifted one hand from her waist and brushed the back of his bent knuckles over the curve of her cheek, his eyes now more brown than green. ‘Why do you ask? You do not still have feelings for me, do you, cara?’
She didn’t answer for the simple reason she couldn’t get her voice to work. She had locked away her feelings for him four years ago, but her chest felt like it was going to explode with the effort of keeping them back.
His thumb stroked over the teeth marks on her lip in a tender caress. ‘You are wavering, are you not?’
Her startled gaze flicked back to his. ‘No…’
He smiled a sexy blood-heating-to-boiling-point smile. ‘That did not sound very convincing, tesore mio.’
‘No,’ she said more stridently this time, although she shivered all over when he brought her hips up against his.
‘Can you feel the effect you have on me?’ he asked in a husky tone. ‘How we still affect each other?’
Scarlett could, but she didn’t want to admit it. She tried to put some space between their bodies, but his hold was both gentle and determined. She was breathing too hard and too shallowly to get her brain to work. Her body was taking over, just like it had all those years ago. One touch from him and she was going weak at the knees, her heart racing with excitement, her blood surging to all her pleasure points in preparation for the exquisite torture of his touch.
His head came down, and she did nothing to stop his lips making contact with hers. Instead she closed her eyes, a soft sigh escaping from her mouth into the warm, dark cavern of his as he held her captive under the searing pressure of his kiss.
His tongue searched for hers in a single commanding thrust that sent an earthquake-like reaction right through her. Aftershocks of pleasure reverberated throughout her body, each of her limbs beginning to tremble with the sheer force of being in his arms again.
His hands shaped her with the confidence of a lover who knew her body well and desired it greatly. She revelled in the possessive clamp of his teeth against her breast as he roughly freed it from the barrier of her clothes, the almost primitive action sending hot sparks of desire to every part of her body. His mouth suckled on her hotly, his tongue laving her nipple, his teeth grazing her again.
Somewhere at the blurry back of her conscience she knew she should be pushing him away, not clutching at him in passionate desperation, but there was nothing she could do to hold back her response. It was as if it was hard-wired into her system; every time he touched her he set her alight with burning need, just as he had done four years ago. One kiss had started something that was way beyond her capability to withstand.
When he lifted her skirt to her waist and searched for her hot, melting core she did nothing to resist him. Instead she gasped with mind-blowing pleasure as his fingers pushed aside the lace of her knickers to find their honeyed target, the movement so sensual, so devastatingly sexy, she arched upwards to have more of him.
‘Please…oh, please…’ she begged as he teased her mercilessly.
‘You want me, cara?’
‘Y-yes…’ she panted as he brushed against the swollen pearl of her need.
He smiled a victor’s smile as he cupped her face with his hand. ‘I knew you would not be able to resist,’ he said. ‘You are the same as you were four years ago—wanton and shameless in your quest for fulfilment.’
His words were enough to bring Scarlett back to earth with a jarring thud. She stepped out of his hold and smoothed down her skirt with what precious little dignity she had left. ‘As far as I recall, this wasn’t part of the contract,’ she said with a cutting edge to her voice.
‘I am prepared to pay double time for out-of-hours work,’ he put in with suave smoothness.
She glared at him, affronted. ‘You think you can afford me, Alessandro?’
His cynical smile cut through her like a scalpel. ‘You can name your price, Scarlett. I will pay it to have you in my arms again. And, yes, I can afford you.’ The dark gaze raked her mercilessly. ‘Easily.’
She folded her arms across her body, more to stop one of them slapping that arrogant look off his face. She couldn’t believe his audacity, to think he could buy her like the whore he thought she was. ‘I want to go home,’ she said with a petulant toss of her head. ‘Now.’
‘You will go home when I say you can go home.’
She sent him a glowering look. ‘You can’t hold me here against my will.’
He stepped towards her, backing her against the wall as he stroked his hands down the length of her bare arms, his touch like silk sliding over a warm, smooth surface. ‘But it will not be against your will, will it, cara?’ he asked. ‘I can see the longing in your eyes. You would be on that floor flat on your back by now, if your pride had not got in the way.’
Scarlett wanted to deny it, but knew he would never believe her, not when she had allowed him to touch her so intimately just moments earlier.
She mentally cringed in shame. How could she have allowed herself to succumb to his lethal charm in such a degrading way? It confirmed all his misguided opinions of her as a shallow, money-hungry tart who would open her legs for the highest bidder.
‘At least I have some measure of pride,’ she tossed back after a tense pause.
His hazel gaze pinned hers. ‘How much do you want to be my lover again?’
She flattened her spine against the wall. ‘I told you, Alessandro, you can’t afford me.’
His eyes hardened with chips of cold-green purpose. ‘How much, Scarlett? How much to have you in my bed again for the time I am in Sydney?’
CHAPTER SEVEN
SCARLETT eyeballed him with gritty determination. ‘It may have escaped your notice, but I don’t have a “for sale” sign stamped on my forehead.’
His mouth tipped up at one corner. ‘Like a lot of women I know, Scarlett, you have a price. But what you are doing by these delaying tactics is trying to drive up the price a little further, is it not?’
She sent him a caustic glare. ‘I am not going to be used by you, not for any price.’
‘It is a very clever manoeuvre,’ he said as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘And well known in the circles I move in.’
‘Yes, well, I don’t care for the circles you move in,’ she said primly. ‘Your model friend is a case in point. She’s looking for prestige and notoriety by hanging off your arm. I would have thought by now you would have been able to pick it up a mile off. She’s after money and nothing else.’
‘Velika has nothing to do with the arrangement we have made between ourselves,’ he said.
Scarlett felt like stamping her foot. ‘There is no arrangement between us!’ she insisted.
He lifted one dark brow meaningfully. ‘Aren’t you forgetting something, Scarlett?’
She swallowed convulsively as she saw the flecks of brown in his eyes darken, her stomach turning over itself as he tilted her chin up with the point of one finger. ‘You signed a contract, Scarlett, remember?’ he said, his eyes locking on hers. ‘Your business will fall over if you have to pay your way out of your contract with me.’
She ran the tip of her tongue over the dryness of her lips, her heart beginning to pick up its pace alarmingly. ‘Are you…?’ She cleared her throat when her voice dried up and began again. ‘B-blackmailing me into your bed?’
His smile was slanted at a devastatingly sexy angle. ‘Blackmail is rather a distasteful term, is it not? I was hoping you would agree to resume our affair without having to resort to using such underhand tactics,’ he said. ‘After all, you have made it very clear you are still attracted to me.’
‘That’s totally irrelevant!’ she argued. ‘Physical attraction to someone doesn’t give automatic licence to have an affair with them. There’s such a thing as self-control, you know.’
He ran his hands down her arms to encircle her wrists again, his long, strong fingers like twin bracelets of velvet-covered steel. ‘I do not feel any self-control when I am around you, cara,’ he said as his eyes held hers in the magnetic force-field of his gaze. ‘I never did, and I sometimes wonder if I ever will.’
Scarlett could feel the slow melt of her bones under his touch, her belly doing tiny, jerky somersaults as each of his thumbs began stroking the sensitive undersides of her wrists. Desire pulsed hot and thickly through her bloodstream, her skin tingling in response to his drugging caresses. Her legs were weakening beneath her, and she felt the involuntary loosening of her spine as one of his hands went to the lower curve of her back and brought her up against his hardness.
‘Kiss me, Scarlett,’ he commanded softly. ‘Kiss me the way you used to do, with your whole body and soul.’
Scarlett’s gaze dropped to his mouth and her belly did another sudden flip-turn. ‘I-I don’t think—’
His hand at her back pressed her even closer. ‘What are you frightened of, tesore mio?’ he asked.
She moistened her lips with a tentative movement of her tongue, in case it accidentally brushed his mouth hovering so close to hers. ‘I-I’m not frightened,’ she said, even though fear had already thickened her throat so she could barely swallow.
His lips nibbled at the side of her mouth, so close to the tingling fullness of her bottom lip she felt her legs begin to tremble, his warm breath dancing over her face and mouth tantalisingly. She felt the brush of his tongue against her cheek, and then along the seam of her mouth, the sensual movement making all hope of resisting him impossible.
She gave a little whimper and opened her mouth under the next sweep of his tongue, taking him inside to her moist warmth, mating with him in a dancing duel that mimicked what their bodies had done so well together in the past. Passion flared like a bush fire, the hot, licking flames sending Scarlett’s heart-rate soaring as his pelvis ground against hers, his hardness against her velvet softness making every scrap of sense she possessed move even further out of reach of reason and rationality. She clung to him, her mouth on fire beneath the passionate onslaught of his, her teeth nipping at him as he nipped at her, her tongue flicking as his thrust, her body turning to liquid as his grew rock-hard and insistent.
His hands went back to her breasts, pushing aside her scooped neckline to gain access, his mouth a hot brand as he sucked on each engorged nipple in turn. Scarlett was vaguely aware of crying out in pleasure, partially aware too of digging her fingers into the thick hair of his scalp as she arched her spine to have more of his heat against her.
‘You are just as passionate as you were before,’ Alessandro said against her neck, his tone husky with desire. ‘Perhaps even more so.’
Scarlett pulled away from him with an effort, her conscience an unbearable burden. She couldn’t do this. Not while he thought she was only coming to him in exchange for money. It sullied everything they had shared in the past. It tainted everything she had given of herself. She had adored him; she had worshipped him in every way imaginable. To be reduced to a mere plaything was anathema to her.
‘What is wrong, cara?’ Alessandro asked.
She moistened her dry lips. ‘Please take me home,’ she said, tears shining in her eyes. ‘Please…’
Alessandro frowned as he considered talking her into staying a little longer. He knew it would not take much to persuade her—she was clearly as aroused as he was—but something about those tears in her grey-blue eyes warned him he had pushed her a little too far too soon. He had plenty of time; after all, the Arlington project would take several months to complete. He would no doubt have numerous opportunities to convince her to be his mistress again. He would have to be patient, that was all. He had waited this long; he could wait a little longer.
He reached for his keys and gave her a twisted smile. ‘Come, tesore mio,’ he said. ‘I have found out what I needed to know in any case.’
Scarlett wanted to ask him what he meant, but she had a feeling she already knew. She followed him out to his car and sat in a miserable, guilt-stricken silence as he drove her back to her tiny flat.
He walked her to the door and waited until she had unlocked it, before he bent down to press a barely-there kiss to both of her cheeks. ‘Sweet dreams,’ he said. ‘I will see you soon, no?’
Scarlett’s throat was almost too tight to reply. ‘Y-yes…’
Once Roxanne had left a few minutes later Scarlett went into her son’s bedroom. One of his little arms was flung over the edge of the bed, the other clutching a matchbox car close to his face. She gently unpeeled his little fingers, her heart contracting painfully when she found a shiny-black Maserati lying there…
‘Phone for you,’ Roxanne said when Scarlett came inside the studio the next morning. ‘It’s Alessandro. By the way, I told him you’re not involved with Dylan. And you can stop looking at me like that. He asked and I answered.’
Scarlett was still scowling as she picked up her extension. ‘Hello, Scarlett Fitzpatrick speaking.’
‘So you have decided to concentrate your efforts on the biggest return, eh, cara?’
‘That is a despicable thing to say,’ she said, turning her back on Roxanne.
‘Are you missing me, cara?’
Scarlett felt her heart miss a beat at that low, velvet drawl, her stomach crawling all over again with desire.
He suddenly laughed, the deep rumble sending tiny shivers of reaction to the core of her being. ‘You cannot help yourself, eh, Scarlett? You want me even though you do not want to do so. It is the same for me. I did not think I would feel this way about you, but I do.’
Scarlett held her breath. ‘What are you saying?’
