The Boss's Christmas Seduction: Unlocking her Innocence / Million Dollar Christmas Proposal / Not Just the Boss's Plaything

‘That’s OK, no big deal,’ Ava soothed softly, patently unaware of how rare it was for Vito to do anything without thinking it through first. ‘It’s not important.’

‘I’m not about to fall in love with you and marry you or anything like that!’ Vito warned her, derision at the idea giving his mouth a sardonic twist. ‘This is an affair, nothing more complex. Don’t overthink it.’

‘I never thought I would say it but you talk too much,’ Ava told him with sudden amusement. ‘I’m not that daft dreaming teenager you remember—I grew up and I’m not even twenty-two yet. I don’t want to get married for years and years and years!’

‘I don’t ever want to get married,’ Vito traded, throwing himself back against the pillows while wondering how he could possibly be irritated by her total lack of interest in marrying him. Naturally that was good news and she was blessedly free of the carefully presented hypocrisies with which his more usual style of lover sought to set him at his ease. Of course she was ten years younger than he was and that was a fair gap, he acknowledged, tension filtering through his momentary relaxation. In fact it was almost cradle-snatching.

Ava leant over him, her hair brushing a big shoulder while she marvelled at the conversation they were having. ‘I don’t want to marry you. I want to play the field and have fun first.’

‘If Damien Skeel comes on to you, you tell me,’ Vito spelt out rawly in a knee-jerk reaction that shook him because it seemed to come from some strange place inside him he didn’t recognise. ‘And you’re not going to be playing the field and having fun with anyone but me until we’re over. Is that understood?’

A pang pierced Ava. She didn’t like to hear him talk of their affair being over before it had even really begun. It hurt, just as breaking up would hurt, she reminded herself impatiently. She wasn’t a kid any more. She didn’t cherish a little soap bubble fantasy of Vito falling madly in love with her and sweeping her down the aisle to an altar. Even as a teenager she had not been that naïve.

‘Do you always lay down the law in bed like you’re in the boardroom?’ Ava teased.

‘I need to with you. You’re a new and very original box of tricks, cara mia,’ Vito contended, pushing her playfully flat against the pillows to extract a long, drugging kiss that sent her heartbeat into overdrive.

She felt tiny beneath him, crushed by his broad chest and the hair-roughened thigh that had slid between hers. She was madly aware of her nipples tightening into tingling buds and of the hard press of his arousal against her. He wanted her. For a split second she simply luxuriated in that sweet wonderful knowledge. She wanted him and he wanted her. Finally, the time was right. And then in dismay she recalled the rather childish tattoo on her hip and resolved to buy some large plasters as soon as she could to conceal that revealing marking before he could see it. He wouldn’t think of her as an adult for long if he caught a glimpse of that.

Vito sat up and tossed back the duvet. ‘What on earth are you wearing?’ he demanded.

‘My PJs.’

‘Gingham just isn’t sexy,’ Vito pronounced with authority and embarked on the buttons.

Ava lay there stiff with embarrassment while he stripped off her pyjamas and reminded herself that he had seen it all before and that it was silly to feel so self-conscious. ‘Put the light out,’ she still urged him.

‘No … you’re a work of art and I want to savour you,’ Vito countered without hesitation, studying the long svelte line of her pale body. ‘I was in far too much of a hurry yesterday.’

‘I’m cold,’ she told him, hauling up the duvet at speed again.

‘No, you’re shy and I never realised that before. Ava Fitzgerald … shy,’ Vito commented with rich amusement. ‘Wow … you’ve turned as pink as a lobster.’

‘If you refer to lobsters and me in the same sentence again you can go back to your own room!’ Ava hissed vitriolically, blue eyes sparkling like sapphires in her elfin face.

‘It’s not happening.’ With a sudden laugh, Vito crushed her mouth beneath his again, his tongue delving deep in a devouring kiss that sent erotic thrills coursing through her all too ready body. When he discarded his rigid self-discipline and reserve, there was so much passion pent-up inside him, Ava thought, thrilled by his approach.

His mouth closed over the swollen peak of her breast and she shivered as he tasted and teased her with his tongue. The glide of his teeth followed and she moaned, startled and aroused, the heat at the heart of her beginning to build. Her hips arched and he stilled her.

‘We’re going to do this right this time, bella mia,’ Vito informed her, his exotically handsome features taut with determination.

‘Right?’ Ava repeated in disbelief. ‘Keep the control freakiness for the office.’

‘I am not a control freak,’ Vito growled.

He so was. Ava cupped his face and connected with smouldering golden eyes that made her heartbeat hammer. He was beautiful. She just loved looking at him, and then he kissed her again with that sensual full mouth and the ability to think fell away. As he began to lick and kiss his way down over her body her hands dug into his shoulders and suddenly it was a challenge to breathe. She thought he might be going to do … that, not something she could imagine doing with anyone, not even him. She tried to urge him back up again but either he failed to take the hint or he deliberately put himself out of reach.

‘Vito … I don’t think I want that,’ Ava muttered tightly.

‘Give me a one-minute trial,’ Vito purred, settling hot, hungry eyes on her. ‘While you think about it.’

Already pink, Ava could feel herself turn hot red and she just closed her eyes, not wanting to be inhibited and a turn-off. His hands smoothed over her thighs and eased them apart. I’m not going to like this but I’ll put up with it, she decided, and then he touched her with his tongue on the most super-sensitive part of her body and she almost leapt in the air at the sensation. He made a soothing sound deep in his throat that she found incredibly sexy. Slow-burning pleasure turned to raw ecstasy incredibly fast and she went wild, gasping and rising off the bed as an explosive climax engulfed her. Dazed by it, she felt limp as he shifted over her and sank into her hard and fast. Nothing had ever felt as intense. Her body had discovered a new level of sensitivity and in its already heightened state, his rapid powerful movements swiftly awakened the throbbing heat and hunger of need again.

‘Porca miseria! You make me wild!’ Vito panted.

Her every sense was on hyper alert and excitement as she had never known was clawing at her. She didn’t have the breath to respond. Her fingers raked down his back over his flexing muscles as she reacted to sensations as close to pleasure as torment, wanting more, wanting, her entire body reaching as her back arched and the glorious splintering high peak of blinding pleasure engulfed her again as a shrill cry was wrenched from her.

‘On a scale of one to ten that was a twenty,’ Vito husked in her ear. ‘I’m sorry, I was rough—’

‘I liked it,’ Ava mumbled in a forgiving mood, both arms wrapped round him, happiness dancing and leaping through her limp, satiated body like sunlight on a dull wintry day.

‘You’re miraculous, gioia mia,’ Vito said thickly, an almost bemused look in his stunning dark eyes as he bent down awkwardly and dropped a kiss on her nose. But he then freed her from his weight and proximity so fast that her hands literally trailed off him and she half sat up in surprise as he strode into the bathroom. He had used contraception, she reminded herself dizzily. Miraculous? Was that good? Her mind was full of words like, ‘astonishing, magnificent, unbelievable’. Even so, she wished he hadn’t left her so suddenly. As that thought occurred to her Vito reappeared and swept up his robe to put it on. Ava blinked. He wasn’t coming back to bed? Perhaps he was hungry.

Vito had got halfway to the door before Ava spoke. ‘Where are you going?’

‘To bed.’ Vito half turned back to her, a brow slightly quirked as though he wondered why she was asking such an obvious question of him.

Such fury shot through Ava that she felt light-headed with it. ‘Oh, so that’s it for tonight, is it? Having got what you wanted, you just walk out on me?’

Vito swung all the way round and levelled stunned dark eyes on her. ‘I always sleep in my own bed … it is not meant as an insult or any kind of statement.’

‘You mean you never spend the night with anyone?’ Ava prompted, utterly disconcerted by the news.

‘I like my privacy,’ Vito admitted a shade curtly, unable to understand why she was complaining when no other woman ever had.

‘Well, you can have all the privacy you want from me,’ Ava snapped back at him. ‘But let me make one thing clear—if you walk through that door you don’t get back in again on any pretext!’

His eyes shimmered and narrowed, his face tensing with the surprise and considerable hauteur of a male unaccustomed to any form of rejection from a woman. ‘You can’t be serious.’

‘That’s the way it is, Vito. Take it or leave it. I thought the practice of droit de seigneur went out with the Crusades and you’re not going to treat me like a late-night snack and get away with it!’ Ava slung tempestuously as she punched a pillow, doused the light to leave him poised in darkness and lay down again.

Vito opened the door, hesitated—fatally, he later realised. He thought of waking up beside Ava. He shed his robe where he stood.

As Ava felt the mattress give beneath his weight she thought about the power of ‘miraculous’ sex over a male and it made her want to punch him more than ever. He was spoilt by too much money and too many eager-to-please women.

‘Am I expected to cuddle as well?’ Vito enquired with sardonic bite.

‘If you value your life, stay on your own side of the bed,’ Ava advised bluntly.

Silence fell, a silence laden with nerve-racking undertones. Ava grimaced in the darkness and wished she had kept quiet. You could lead a horse to water but you couldn’t make it drink, she reminded herself wryly, a situation not improved by the fact that he was stubborn as a mule. He didn’t do the cuddly sleeping-together stuff but she didn’t think she could do an affair without affection at the very least. Who are you kidding? she asked herself. She was only at the castle for another two weeks and the minute the party was done, she would be history. She needed to learn how to take each day as it came just the way she had done in prison, but there was no way on earth that she would live according to his rules alone.

‘I shouldn’t have lost my temper with you about Olly’s room,’ Vito mused very quietly.

‘I shouldn’t have gone ahead and touched it without speaking to you about it first,’ Ava traded, her stiffness receding a little.

‘I used to go in there and sit in the months after the funeral,’ Vito volunteered curtly. ‘Fortunately I managed to wean myself off that habit, so there was no reason to leave the room the way it was while he was alive.’

Ava gritted her teeth and bit back hasty words because Vito was a stiff-upper-lip kind of male. ‘Why should you have had to wean yourself off going in there?’ she finally asked. ‘There was no harm in it if it gave you comfort.’