Mills & Boon Stars Collection: Shocking Scandals: Castelli's Virgin Widow / Expecting a Royal Scandal / The Guardian's Virgin Ward

“If you hit me again,” he told her softly, “I’ll return the favor.”

“You’ll hit me?” Her eyes were grim in the dark. “I’m glad your father is dead, Luca. He would have been horrified by you.”

He ignored the little flare of something a good deal like shame deep inside him then, even as it knotted itself in his gut.

“Let’s be very clear about this,” he said, and he was aware on a distant level that the fury that had been riding him all through dinner had eased. Not disappeared, but loosened its hold. He didn’t ask himself why. “It will be a very cold day in hell before I worry myself over what my father, of all people, might have thought about anything I do. Much less what you think. That’s the moral equivalent of taking lectures on good behavior from the devil himself.” He eyed her in the close confines of the car’s backseat, where he was still too much in her space, and it still wasn’t enough. Not close enough. Not enough. “But I don’t hit women. Not even when they’ve hit me first.”

She had the grace to look faintly abashed at that, and her gaze dropped to her hand. She flexed her fingers out in front of her, and he wondered if her palm stung as much as his jaw did. The idea didn’t make that heavy knot inside him loosen any.

He reached over and took her hand in his, and held on when she tried to jerk it out of his grasp. He ignored the little huff of air that escaped her lips, and smoothed his fingers over her palm as if he was tracing it. As if he wanted to rub the sting out.

As if he didn’t know what the hell he wanted.

“Hit me again, Kathryn,” he said in a low voice, looking at her hand instead of her face, “and I’ll take that as an invitation to finish what we started last night. No matter how many old men you make dance to your tune at a dinner table. No matter who you’re pretending to be tonight.”

Her fingers curled as if she wanted to clench them into a fist.

“I’m not pretending to be anyone,” she snapped at him. “The only person playing a game here is you. And there will never be an invitation to finish anything. That was an aberration. A terrible, horrifying mistake. I have no idea why it happened and—”

“Don’t you?”

He hadn’t meant to ask that question, but once out, it seemed to hover there between them, threatening everything. Pounding in him so hard it became indistinguishable from his own heartbeat.

“No,” she whispered, but her gray eyes were too large and too dark. Her pretty mouth trembled with the lie of it. And he could feel the tremor she fought to repress in that hand he held between his. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I never do.”

And Luca smiled. Hard. “Let me give you some clarity.”

He let go of her hand and reached for her, wrapping his hands around her waist and lifting her out of her seat and over his lap. He heard her breath desert her as he settled her against him, her legs to one side. Then he simply bent his head and took her mouth with his.

Once again, that maddening fire. Once again, that swift shock, lust and need, greed and hunger, burning him alive.

As hot and as wild as if they were still in her bed. As if they’d never left, never stopped.

And she didn’t fight him. She didn’t pretend. He felt her give in to this thing that pounded between them, felt the heady rush of her surrender.

She hooked her arms around his neck as if she couldn’t control herself any more than he could, then she opened her mouth to him and kissed him back.

And Luca lost track of everything.

That he was trying to make a point. That they were in the back of a moving car. That she was the last woman on earth he should be touching at all, much less like this. That he absolutely should not be doing this.

He simply lost himself in the perfection of her mouth. The sweet heat of the way she kissed him and tangled her fingers in his hair. The weight of her slender body against his and the sheer desperation in the way they came together.

Again and again.

But it wasn’t enough.

He groaned against her mouth, and she shifted against him as if he’d lit her on fire, the curve of her hip coming up hard against his aching sex.

And Luca stopped pretending he had any control where this woman was concerned. Or at all.

He shifted her on top of him, swinging her around to straddle him. He shoved the dress she wore up and out of his way, settling her down astride his lap, and he almost lost it when she gasped into his mouth as the softest part of her came up flush against his hardness.

He could feel her shudder all around him, or maybe that was him, as lost in this insanity as she was.

There was no control. There was no hint of it. And the truly scary part of that was how little Luca cared that it was gone.

There was nothing but his hands buried in her hair again and his mouth against hers, feasting on her. Ravishing her. He could feel her wet heat against him and rolled himself into it, aware that only the fabric of his trousers and the insubstantial panties she wore separated them. He let the slick, hot glory of it build.

There was nothing but her taste, an addictive wildness against his tongue. She surrounded him, more beautiful with her dress at her waist and her hair half– falling down from its elegant little knot than any other woman he’d ever seen.

Than anything at all.

And Luca found himself muttering things he knew better than to say out loud, even if he was speaking in Italian.

“Tu sei mia,” he told her. You are mine. He didn’t know where that had come from, what the hell he was doing. Why he meant such things down deep in his bones, when he shouldn’t. When he couldn’t.

But he found he didn’t much care then. He filled his hands with the taut curves of her bottom and guided her against him in an unapologetically carnal rhythm, until she tilted her head back and moaned.

So he did it even harder, watching her face go slack as she rocked against him, driving him crazy, making him so hard and ready for her it bordered on pain. He moved his hand from her gorgeous bottom, sliding it around to find the heat of her with his fingers through the barrier of those soft panties.

“Look at me, Kathryn,” he ordered her, his voice little more than a growl.

She obeyed. And her eyes were wide and gray. Slicked hot with desire. Her lips were parted, and her cheeks were flushed. Luca felt something shift inside him, a sharp and uncompromising tilt. He couldn’t name it, though there was no pretending he didn’t feel it. He only knew that he was no longer the same man he’d been even five minutes before.

There was only Kathryn, arched above him, straining against him, her beautiful eyes locked on to his.

And there is this, he thought, sliding his hands into her panties and slicking his way through the molten wildfire of her sweet core to find the neediest part of her. Then he pressed down, hard and sure, and watched her hurtle over the side of the world.

She bucked against him as her pleasure tumbled through her, making greedy little noises that were almost his undoing, her fingers digging hard into his shoulders, her head thrown back and her lovely back arched like a bow.

And everything shifted again, but this time, all the hunger and greed and sense in his body surged straight to his sex.

Luca needed to be inside her. Right now.

She was still shaking, still astride him. She was still panting as she tipped forward until she could rest her forehead against his shoulder. And now he could feel her harsh little breaths as well as hear them, and somehow, that made everything hotter.

Closer. Crazier. Better.

He reached between them, amazed to find his hand was unsteady as he pulled himself from his trousers at last, so aching and so hard. Kathryn was limp now, still shuddering and gasping, and he simply pulled her panties to one side and lined himself up with her entrance, the scalding heat of her nearly enough to make him lose it right there.

He thought he swore in Italian, or perhaps it was a prayer. She was slick and hot, and he didn’t care where else she’d been or with whom. He didn’t care why. He didn’t care about anything but the way she fit in his arms, his lap.

He didn’t care about anything but this.

It had been two years of sheer torment with this woman; he could admit that now, when the truth seemed so obvious at last. He’d wanted her from the moment he’d first laid eyes on her. Perhaps he would always want her. But that wasn’t something Luca wanted to think about. Not now when she was everything he’d ever wanted, poised there above him, hot and wet and nearly his.

Nearly.