The Italian's Baby of Passion: The Italian's Secret Baby / One-Night Baby / The Italian's Secret Child

‘You said you don’t have time for boyfriends.’

‘Well, I don’t.’

‘That probably explains your short temper.’ His fuse was certainly getting extremely short.

He could trace the source with great precision to the moment he had walked into her office and found her struggling into that too-tight top. When you lived in a society where you were constantly bombarded with images of provocatively undressed women it was kind of ironic that he had got so totally hung up over a one-blink-and-you’ll-miss-it glimpse of bare flesh.

‘Everything is about sex with you, isn’t it?’ she accused. ‘You’re obsessed,’ she condemned crossly.

It took something as simple as a throw-away comment sometimes. His dark eyes trailed across her face, the soft contours of which he knew were already fixed in his memory. So was the sound of her laugh and her glare and the way…in fact he could access all her facial expressions any time he liked and also sometimes when he didn’t like.

‘You might not be wrong there,’ he agreed.

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘I think you do. I think you also know how good sex could be for us,’ he rasped in a throaty voice that turned the heavy feeling low in her belly into an actual ache. ‘But for some reason you’re denying it.’

She closed her eyes and counted to a hundred slowly; all it did was panic her into impetuous speech.

‘Actually I don’t know a damned thing about sex,’ she heard herself announce loudly. ‘And before you offer I don’t want any lessons from you.’

‘Lessons…now that conjures up some very interesting—’ He stopped dead, the teasing expression fading dramatically from his face. Eyes narrowed, he subjected her to a hard, searching scrutiny. ‘Good God!’ he ejaculated hoarsely. ‘You’re a virgin.’

CHAPTER ELEVEN

‘WHETHER I am or not is totally irrelevant and none of your business,’ Scarlet was driven by sheer embarrassment to retort.

‘It won’t be irrelevant to the guy who sleeps with you,’ Rowan promised grimly.

Scarlet heard the shaken note in his voice. Well, she’d wanted to turn him off and it would seem she’d succeeded.

‘Obviously that changes things,’ he added soberly.

Scarlet glared at him indignantly. ‘I don’t see why. I may not be vastly experienced, but I think I’d manage to keep up with you. How hard can it be?’

Something moved at the back of his eyes in response to her challenge. ‘There’s only one way to find out.’ He heard the words come out of his mouth but still he couldn’t believe he’d been responsible for them. A virgin? I’m mad out of my head, insane.

He watched the rapid rise and fall of her breasts, her lips slightly parted and rosily moist and her eyes—eyes that were frequently a mirror image of her mood—sparkling with reckless challenge.

‘What have you been doing—waiting for the right man?’ he blasted, suddenly mad as hell with her.

Scarlet blinked, bewildered by his anger. ‘Well, that rules you out!’

A nerve jumped along his hard jaw as he leant closer, his voice soft in her ear. ‘I may not be the right man, Scarlet, but maybe I’m the wrong man? Sometimes the wrong man, like the forbidden fruit, can be more exciting.’

Mesmerised by the erotic rasp of his low voice and spectacular pitch-black smouldering eyes, she stared up at him so painfully excited and aroused she had to fight for each individual breath. Her body, every inch of her skin was burning, trickles of moisture formed in the hollow between her breasts and tiny trickles ran down the smooth skin of her back.

‘I…I…’ she stuttered, staring at him in undisguised longing. He was so beautiful she wanted to cry; he was so beautiful she wanted to beg him to touch her. Her mind was so consumed by desire that she had no other thought in her head but assuaging the hunger inside her.

He touched the side of her face, and looked into eyes wide and startled. Scarlet returned his stare before sucking in a deep breath and closing her eyes tight to shut out his probing stare.

She felt as if her feelings were written in neon a mile high across her face. She loved him. She who had always scoffed at the idea of love at first sight had fallen madly, deeply and irrevocably in love with Roman O’Hagan.

His fingers barely brushed her skin yet a moan was drawn from deep in her throat. She felt him take her hands within his and she lifted her head. He was standing over her. She trembled as he unfurled her tightly clenched fingers before placing both her hands palm down against his chest. She felt the ripple of taut muscles beneath her fingers and the last vestiges of restraint melted away in the heat of arousal.

Drawing a deep breath, she splayed her fingers and deepened the exploration of the hard male contours. She could feel the heat of his skin through the fine fabric of his shirt.

‘You’re totally incredible,’ she breathed.

‘I want your hands on me.’

Scarlet, her tongue caught between her teeth as she concentrated all her senses on the tactile sensation, slid her fingers through the inviting gap between the buttons.

‘You’re warm,’ she whispered, trailing one finger slowly along the hard but incredibly smooth muscled ridges of his perfectly developed chest down to his flat belly.

With a mumbled hoarse imprecation Roman took hold of the expensive fabric of his shirt and pulled. There was a harsh ripping sound and buttons flew across the room.

‘Your shirt!’ she protested.

‘I’ve got other shirts.’ With a shrug he dismissed the damaged article that hung loosely open to his waist. ‘However I’ve only one mind and if you don’t touch me it could be permanently damaged,’ he claimed, taking her wrist.

Scarlet only spent a moment wondering what he was going to do before he placed her hand palm-flat against the broad expanse of softly gleaming golden flesh his violent action had exposed. She felt the sharp contraction of taut muscles beneath her hand and her own stomach muscles spasmed as if in sympathy.

His warm, fragrant breath brushed her sensitive earlobe as he inclined his dark, glossy head. ‘No, not warm,’ he contradicted. ‘Hot. You,’ he confided huskily, ‘make me hot. From the moment I saw those delicious little breasts of yours I wanted to taste them. I wanted…’

Scarlet, who felt light-headed and strangely removed from what was happening, smiled; it was a smile of anticipation. Perhaps it was that distance, that sense of unreality that enabled her to respond with such devastating honesty? Or maybe something in her instinctively recognised that the situation warranted some plain speaking. Either way she knew this wasn’t the time to be sensible or cautious.

Hell! Hadn’t she had a lifetime of being both? Didn’t she deserve just a little madness?

‘No, don’t say it,’ she begged, directing her passionglazed slumberous stare to his face. ‘Do it!’ she commanded, reaching up to greedily sink her fingers in his hair. The dark waves were ebony and slippery like silk, but she clung hard, yanking his face down to her level.

‘It hurts,’ she told him, pressing her mouth hard against his. Her eyes were glittering with a feverish brilliance when her head lifted.

‘What hurts?’ he asked raggedly.

‘Wanting to touch you hurts. I’ve never wanted anything or anyone as much as I want you,’ she revealed starkly.

For a long sizzling moment their glances froze, the mutual message of hunger between them a palpable entity. His gasp, the one that moulded his belly into a tight, concave curve, was part of the same fluid movement that scooped her up into his arms.

Scarlet’s arms looped about his neck, her legs locked tight around his middle, she kissed him with all the fervour of a mouse totally determined the cat would catch her as Roman bore his burden in the general direction of the bedroom.

They collided with several large items of furniture, knocked over a lamp, a framed picture and sundry items, but neither registered the destruction they left in their wake.

Roman didn’t bother to detach her from him; instead he fell onto the bed with her on top of him.

He looked up at the woman who sat wantonly astride him…Given what he knew, could she legitimately be called a woman? He pushed aside the distracting question and indulged his senses fully in the delicious image—delicious curves, lush mouth and shiny take-me-now eyes.

Scarlet looked around her, her perplexed expression suggesting she didn’t have the faintest idea how she’d come to be there.