Summer Surrender: Capelli's Captive Virgin / Italian Boss, Proud Miss Prim / The Italian's One-Night Love-Child

A shiver of awareness ripped through her whole body and she didn’t pretend to misunderstand him.

‘Well—maybe I have. Once.’ Her heart was thumping and bumping against her chest, as if it were trying to escape while there was still a chance.

His fingers tightened on her shoulder. ‘You have willpower that most people would envy.’

‘If you’re talking about us, then we would have been a nightmare together, you know we would.’

He gave a low laugh and rolled her gently onto her back. ‘It would have been explosive, tesoro. And you know it. Which is why you’ve been holding back. What’s wrong with sexual attraction, Lindsay?’

‘Nothing, as long as both parties recognise it for what it is. Ruby doesn’t.’

This was the time that she should push him away. This was the time she should tell him that, although she’d realised she’d handled Ruby all wrong, she didn’t want to change the way she lived herself. She wasn’t about to hurl herself from a place of safety into the dangerous unknown of raw sexual excitement.

She should tell him that. She should tell him that right now.

But she couldn’t manage to form the words. Instead her hand slid over his shoulder, feeling the hard curve of male muscle under her seeking fingers.

This level of chemistry wasn’t something she’d ever experienced before—and probably never would again.

If she let it pass, would she regret it?

Would she look back in her old age and think, If only?

Or would she smile and tell her grandchildren that passion wasn’t always dangerous, as long as you recognised it for what it was?

There would be no ‘happy ever after’ with Alessio Capelli, but she knew that, didn’t she? It wasn’t a mistake. It was a choice.

‘Lindsay—’ The husky, questioning note in his voice made her realise that her hand had curved around his neck.

She sensed that he was holding back—that this was all up to her—but she had no more time to agonise over her decision because her hands were drawing his head towards hers.

Apparently it was all the encouragement he needed because he instantly took control, his hands not quite steady as he rolled her onto her back and covered her body with his.

It seemed that her senses still remembered how he’d kissed her on the beach, and a pool of heat coiled itself in her pelvis and she waited in an agony of anticipation for the slow, skilled assault of his mouth.

Only this time he didn’t give her slow.

This time he brought his mouth down on hers with a driven sense of purpose that propelled her from a state of simmering anticipation to explosive excitement. Hot with longing, she felt him cup her face with lean, strong hands and then part her lips with his tongue. He took her mouth with devastating expertise, his demanding and intimate exploration creating erotic curls of heat low in her pelvis.

It was like being drugged and her last coherent thought was, How did he learn to kiss like this? Before she slid down and down into a sensual world that was beyond her control.

Her senses connected like an electric circuit, sending sparks to every part of her and she was lost, totally lost.

She pressed herself against his hard, powerful body, felt the roughness of his thigh graze against the softness of hers, felt the scrape of stubble against her cheek as he dragged his mouth from hers only to bury it in her neck.

‘Alessio—I can’t wait—don’t wait—’ She writhed, lost in the sensation he was creating. ‘Please—’ But her plea turned to a moan as she felt his mouth fasten over the pink, throbbing tip of her breast. Up until that moment she hadn’t even realised that he’d removed her costume and suddenly she was aware that she was naked. But the feeling that engulfed her wasn’t embarrassment, but desperation.

It seemed that the more he touched her, the more she wanted, and when she felt his hand reach down between her thighs she gave a low moan of encouragement that changed to a gasp as she felt the skilled slide of his fingers.

She felt wild, desperate and totally unlike herself, writhing against him as she tried to relieve the unbearable ache in her pelvis.

‘You feel so good, tesoro,’ Alessio groaned and then gently moved his hand, cupped her bottom and positioned her to his satisfaction.

For a breathless moment she felt the hot, silken tip of his erection against her, and then he brought his mouth down on hers again and entered her with a series of controlled thrusts that drove the breath from her body. He was big, so big that for a moment she tensed, and he must have sensed her sudden apprehension because he paused for a moment and lifted his mouth from hers just enough to speak.

‘I’m hurting you?’

‘No, I—no—’

‘Then relax, tesoro,’ he instructed huskily, ‘and let your body do what it is desperate to do.’ But he lowered his mouth to hers again and kissed her until the explicit movement of his tongue in her mouth made her rake her fingers over the smooth muscle of his shoulders.

She whimpered deep in her throat and he lifted her hips and sank himself deep inside her, his eyes half-open as he watched her abandoned response. And then he withdrew slightly and did it again, creating waves of pure pulsing pleasure that consumed her entire body.

Completely out of control, she clung to him, her cries smothered by his mouth, her body hovering on the edge of ecstasy as he drove her higher and higher. And then finally, when she thought she couldn’t possibly go on any longer, her body exploded around him and the rhythmic pulse of her moist flesh drove him to his own completion.

Alessio held her firmly as he surged into her over and over again and his rhythmic thrusts prolonged her own sensual ecstasy until the whole experience became one long shower of intolerable excitement.

He woke to sunshine and silence and even before he turned his head to glance around the room, he knew he was alone.