Mills & Boon Stars Collection: Ruthless Demands: The Sicilian’s Stolen Son / The Greek Demands His Heir / The Greek Commands His Mistress

‘No interfering,’ he told her in a roughened undertone. ‘We only do this my way, piccolo mia.’

Colour washed her cheeks because she felt literally shameless lying there half-naked. He used his mouth to torment a straining nipple and she gasped, all self-consciousness wrested from her in the space of a moment. ‘Let me touch you...’ she pleaded.

He released her wrists. ‘Some other time,’ he mumbled, kissing a haphazard trail down over her ribcage and her tightening stomach to part her thighs.

Jemima froze, incredulous at his position and mortified, at least until he touched her and it was as if wildfire shot through her veins. Just as quickly there was nothing in her mind but a feverish concentration on what he was doing to her and how incredibly good it made her feel. Pushing her thighs back, he started slow with a long swipe of his tongue and when her hips lifted of their own accord he laughed softly.

‘I’m really good at this,’ he told her shamelessly.

And he didn’t lie. He found every sensitive spot of arousal hidden in her tender folds, traced and teased those places with sleek, skilled fingertips, the glide and dip of his tongue and even the edge of his teeth. She could feel herself growing achingly wet in response, her heartbeat thumping inside her chest as if she were running a race. A fullness like a dam began to gather and build low in her pelvis and she turned this way and that to cope with the rise of heat and the throbbing torture of his electric exploration, restricted by his strong hold on her hips. Fire was burning through her as sensation piled on sensation at mesmerising speed. And then her own response started becoming more than she could contain, tiny spasms rippling through her quivering body and finally growing into a convulsive wave that swept her up and flung her high before sending her sobbing to earth again. She felt as though the top of her head were flying off while her body felt detached and heavy.

‘I am burning for you, piccolo mia,’ Luciano growled, sliding up over her to claim her mouth again.

He tasted of her and that shocked her but she was already in a state of shock so a little more didn’t seem to matter. She had stepped out of her safe comfortable world into a far more dangerous one and learned weakness. And it wasn’t the incredible allure of what he had made her feel that was her weakness, she acknowledged numbly. Her weakness was him. It was the heady joy she experienced when she saw the wicked smile in those lustrous golden eyes gazing down at her with satisfaction. It was knowing that his pleasing her had pleased him, made him feel good, lifted him out of the bad mood he had been in. That gave her a high more powerful than anything she had ever felt and incandescent warmth filled her.

‘You do something crazy to me,’ Luciano groaned as he rolled back from her to deftly take care of protection. ‘I almost forgot to use a condom.’

Long fingers gripped her hips as he tilted her back and shifted against her. And she felt him nudge against her most tender flesh for the first time. It relit the fire that he had only recently sated, sending a frisson of reflexive hunger coursing through her again. Below his tousled black curls the arresting planes of his lean dark face were taut; his eyes blazed scorching gold with need. He took her mouth again with his, unexpectedly slow and gentle until his tongue delved between her lips and tangled with her own in a delicious dance. Nothing had ever been as arousing as that kiss and it fired her adrenaline. Her hands lifted to sink her fingers into his luxuriant hair and hold him to her but he pulled away a split second before he pushed into her.

‘You’re still so tight,’ Luciano growled in frustration, stilling in an effort to accustom her to his girth, raw need driving his big powerful body as potently as a gun to his head.

She could feel her body stretching to accommodate him and apprehension gathered. She couldn’t tell him that he would be her first because he believed she had birthed his son. He believed she was experienced and would undoubtedly prefer that to the rather pathetic truth. She squeezed her eyes tight shut and arched up to him in determined welcome, keen to get her introduction over with before the little regretful voices inside her head could gain her attention. And she knew what those little voices were about to tell her and she flatly refused to listen. She wanted Luciano and she wanted to know what all the fuss was about. His every tiny movement sent rippling sensation through her outrageously sensitive body.

Luciano pushed her back another few degrees to get a better angle and thrust home.

A searing flash of pain flared through Jemima and she cried out, eyes flying open filled with tears and surprise. ‘That hurts!’

Luciano stilled, staring down at her with brooding, dark disbelief. He knew what his brain was telling him. He knew that his body had met with a resistance that he could not credit existed. While he had known she was not the mother of his son, he had certainly assumed she would be almost as practised with men as her sister had been. The awareness that he had got that badly wrong shook him back to full awareness, clearing his shrewd brain of the fog of alcohol and aggression that had clouded it.

‘Are you OK?’ he asked rawly.

‘Yes, of course I am,’ Jemima assured him and she shifted under him, washing wild sensation through Luciano’s screamingly taut body while need continued to grip him like a hammer blow to the head. He eased out of the wonderfully tight grip of her and sank back into her with a groan of helpless satisfaction.

The pain diminished to a stinging discomfort closely followed by a jolt of exquisite pleasure. As Luciano moved the pleasure kicked in again and again and Jemima clutched at his arms, her knees rising as she arched to meet his next potent thrust. A wild singing impatience shot with primal need held her firmly in its grip and she lifted her hips in time to his fluid movements. He drove deeper and ground down on her and a helpless moan was torn from her lips as he picked up the pace. He slammed into her and her body clenched round him in excitement, her heartbeat thundering. Glorious sensation shimmied through her pelvis and set up a chain reaction that sent her out of control when she convulsed beneath him. She plunged over the crest into a climax of intolerable excitement that sent spasms of delight rippling through her satiated body.

Weak as a kitten, Jemima wrapped her arms round Luciano only to stiffen as he literally shook her off. In a fluid movement he withdrew from her and sprang off the bed to stride into the bathroom. There was blood on him, Luciano acknowledged incredulously as he stepped into the shower. She had actually been a virgin. Where did that unexpected little attribute fit into the lying and gold-digging and plotting he had ascribed to her? What the hell had he been thinking? What the hell had he done?

Luciano pulled on jeans. Incredibly the mere thought of her lush, shapely body aroused him afresh and he wanted to punch something in frustration. A virgin? He was in deep shock and feeling ridiculously guilty. He had been so convinced that Jemima was a lying, gold-digging cheat like his son’s true mother, like... No, he refused to go there, believing that the past was better left buried. But that past had made Luciano a cruel, distrustful cynic with women.

Jemima should have warned him. But how could she have without telling him the truth? Hadn’t she appreciated that the first time might hurt? He had never had to think of that possibility before because he had never even come close to being any woman’s first lover. He had been the first with Jemima, though, and he found himself savouring that knowledge in the weirdest way. It shouldn’t make any difference to his attitude to her...but somehow it did. He could no longer confuse her with Julie the escort or with his late wife, Gigi. Jemima had been considerably more sexually innocent than either.

Hearing Luciano’s movements in the bathroom, Jemima emerged from her own reverie and hurriedly yanked the sheet up over her bare breasts even if the gesture did strike her as too little too late. Luciano appeared in the doorway. What did he think of her now? she wondered for a split second before reality finally came crashing back down on her again. In the storm of her personal doubts and insecurities she had miraculously contrived to forget the lies she had told and they were about to catch up with her, she reckoned wretchedly. Luciano knew now, he had to know that a virgin couldn’t possibly be Nicky’s mum.

Where had her wits been when she’d let him sweep her off to bed? How had she managed to overlook the need to protect the one intimate fact that could prove she was a liar? Of course it hadn’t once occurred to her that she would have sex with Luciano. Fantasy was one thing, actually acting on fantasy something else entirely. Nor had she calculated the very real danger of tempting a male as aggressively dominant as Luciano. He was passionate and oversexed. Knowing she wanted him, he had targeted her and she had been an easy challenge, she reflected shamefacedly.

‘So...’ Luciano breathed silkily, leaning back against the door frame barefoot and bare-chested, wearing only well-worn jeans. With that much unclad masculine flesh on view she found it impossible not to stare. ‘What price do you put on your virginity?’

Jemima blinked. ‘Price?’ she parroted in stricken disbelief.

Luciano raised a well-defined black brow. ‘Well, obviously there has to be a price for me to pay because you put a price on absolutely everything else. You put a price on my son’s worth, didn’t you? Giving away something for free isn’t your style.’

Her face had flamed hot as a fire. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Luciano shifted an impatient hand and studied her fixedly. ‘Quit with the lies, Jemima. Lies only make me angry and you don’t want me angry,’ he warned her.

Lean muscles flexed below bronzed skin as he changed position. The deep chill in his assurance crept through her like the sudden touch of icicles on too-hot skin. He was scaring her but he didn’t need to scare her because Jemima was already fully aware of the wrong she had done. ‘All right, I won’t tell you any more lies,’ she muttered heavily. ‘You know I’m not Nicky’s birth mother now, don’t you?’

‘Obviously. So what’s the going rate for a virgin these days?’ Luciano asked with scorching derision. ‘Presumably you gave it up for a good reason and with you the reason will always relate to profit.’

‘I’m not like that, Luciano!’ Jemima exclaimed in consternation.

His beautiful sensual mouth twisted. ‘If you can try to sell a baby, I assume you can put a price tag on virginity.’

‘I wouldn’t ever have tried to sell a baby!’ Jemima argued fiercely. ‘I know how wrong that would be!’

‘But it wasn’t wrong to keep his father from him when his mother was already dead?’ he shot at her smoothly.

Jemima flinched at that direct question, sudden tears springing to her eyes and stinging like mad. She could not even blame her late twin for her predicament. Indeed she was all too well aware that she had buried herself in the hole she had dug. After all, she had lied to Luciano from the moment she’d met him and compounded her errors by having sex with him. She had done worse than blur the boundaries between right and wrong, she had stepped right over those boundaries.

‘My first question should be...who are you?’ Luciano drawled. ‘But then that would make me a liar too because I already knew that you weren’t who you were pretending to be before we hit the bed.’

Jemima stared at him in dismay. ‘You already knew?’ she exclaimed, disconcerted yet again. ‘And yet you still...’ Her voice drained away as she glanced involuntarily at the disordered bedding.

Angry tension pulled Luciano’s muscles taut. ‘I wasn’t expecting a virgin...’

Jemima was still struggling to accept his earlier statement. ‘You knew I wasn’t Nicky’s mother and yet you were still willing—’

‘Sex is sex, Jemima, and I had had a lot to drink. When the urge controlled me, I didn’t really care who you were,’ Luciano told her with derision.

Her tightly controlled face washed pink and then ran pale. She knew she was being punished for not being more careful about who she became intimate with. He was telling her that he had just used her to scratch an itch and that the shock of her true identity hadn’t been enough to repel him. ‘How long have you known?’ she whispered sickly.

‘Since we landed in Sicily.’

Her pale eyes widened because she was recalling his change of mood at the airport. ‘I know what you must think of me—’

‘You have no idea what I think of you,’ Luciano cut in with icy bite.

‘I love Nicky so much—’

‘Of course you’re going to say that.’

‘I was afraid that if I told you I was only his aunt, you’d just take him away immediately.’

‘I expected you to say that too,’ Luciano incised, lounging back against the door frame, the light behind him glimmering over his powerful pectorals and the hard slab of rippling muscle below.

‘I’ve been with Nicky since he was only a few days old,’ Jemima told him in her own defence while struggling not to sound pleading.

‘And you knew all along that your twin had acted as a surrogate mother?’