The Platinum Collection: Claiming His Innocent: Jess's Promise / A Rich Man's Whim / The Billionaire's Bridal Bargain

Having shed his trousers, Cesario came down on the bed beside her and bent his tousled dark head to the scar on her abdomen. Her heart hammered with tension, butterflies fluttering loose in her tummy as he pressed his mouth gently to the slightly puckered skin. ‘Not ugly, just part of you. I’m sorry you suffered an experience like that and I certainly didn’t need warning, piccola mia.’

He was rarely at a loss for the right thing to say, she thought enviously, only half convinced by his words and gesture that he was not repelled, but the worst of her tension had evaporated. The ferocious tightness of her muscles eased and she rested her head back on the pillow and breathed again. ‘You see, I’m really not a perfect doll.’

‘You’re talking to a guy who wanted you even when you sported a dirty waxed jacket, muddy boots and a team of misfit dogs,’ Cesario reminded her lazily.

‘I’m surprised you didn’t have the dogs booked into the local beauty spa for some grooming,’ Jess teased, balancing on her elbows to stretch up and tilt her parted lips in invitation as though a piece of elastic were pulling her to him to rediscover that warm, sexy mouth of his for herself again.

And that next kiss ravished and seduced and left her dizzy and breathless, wondering where he had been all her life, for no other man had ever made her feel that way. She was already finding out that Cesario was not the guy she had believed him to be. He had much greater depth than she had ever been willing to concede when she reflected on their often spiky exchanges in the stable yard. She had repeatedly failed to look beyond the rich sophisticated façade to the male beneath that glossy patina of worldly success.

Her bra melted away during the kissing and, while he palmed the small pert mound of her breasts, he stroked her pointed nipples and captured them between his lips and sucked until the tingling buds were hard and swollen. Until then, she had not known that she might be so sensitive there. He caressed her until she was gasping for breath and a pool of liquid warmth had infiltrated her pelvis.

‘I want this to be really special for you,’ Cesario husked. ‘But it might hurt.’

‘So, get it over with,’ she urged apprehensively.

Cesario gave her a wicked grin that squeezed her heart inside her chest. ‘Shame on you—that’s the wrong attitude to take. A good lover never rushes a woman.’

He tugged up her legs and skimmed off the white and blue matching knickers, sliding a hand between her slender thighs to find the engorged bud below the black curls on her mound. He teased her with the ball of his thumb and her hips rose off the bed in sensual shock at the sweet erotic surge of arousal. It was almost too intense for her to bear and she was hugely conscious of the surge of moisture there.

Cesario pulled back from her and she studied him with sensually lowered eyelids, taking in the hard sleek contours of his broad chest and the muscles flexing across his flat stomach as he leant back and removed his boxers. He was magnificent and more than a little daunting to inexperienced eyes. He pulled her back to him and studied her with a hint of amusement in his beautiful eyes. ‘I promise to be gentle,’ he intoned, carrying her hand down to his bold shaft and encouraging her to explore his dimensions.

Her hand closed round him, for she was full of desire and curiosity, and she learned that he was strong and smooth, velvet over steel. Answering heat flowered between her legs so that when he took her mouth again with hungry urgency she more than reciprocated the feeling. He began to explore her most secret and responsive flesh, tracing the delicate folds, teasing the nub of her desire and then the damp little entrance. It wasn’t long before little whimpers of sound were escaping her throat, the strength of her wanting making her legs tremble while the unbearable craving and the ache at the heart of her grew stronger by the second. She had not known that anything could feel that powerful and least of all that it might be him who introduced her to the powerfully addictive force of desire.

He taught her to want what she had never learned to want, only wondered about, what she had truly believed she might go to her grave without experiencing, and she had honestly thought that it wouldn’t matter because she wasn’t really missing anything important. So he taught her differently, stroking her with skilful fingers, licking at the wildly sensitive buds of her nipples while he surely, gently prepared her for the ultimate pleasure. But the yearning inside her for more steadily grew intolerable, sharp-edged, greedy and impatient so that she bit in impatient reproach at his lower lip and let her trembling fingers close tight into his luxuriant black hair.

Fluid and strong, he came over her, sliding between her thighs when she was shaking and desperate with pent-up need. She was wildly eager for that first gentle thrust, feeling the stretch of her inner tissue struggling to contain him and then the surge of his hips against her as he drove deeper. It hurt a little more than she had expected and she could not suppress a cry of pain. Instantly he stopped, gazing down at her with those drowningly dark and golden eyes of his that were so beautiful they made her ache.

‘I’m sorry, moglie mia,’ he whispered, brushing her tumbled curls from her brow to press a benediction of a kiss there. ‘It will ease…I hope.’

Her inner muscles tightened round him and he groaned with an uninhibited sensuality that thrilled her and he shifted lightly, slowly, sinking into her by erotic degrees until she didn’t know where he ended and she began. But it was an overpoweringly good feeling and she moved sinuously beneath him, angling up her hips to encourage him, all discomfort forgotten. As he withdrew and came back into her, her excitement began to build. Excitement laced with deep, deep pleasure at the motion of him in her and over her. His slow, steady rhythm ensured that the tight feeling low in her pelvis began to expand and spread outward, sucking her into a vortex of intense driving sensation. And then without even knowing where she was going and simply blindly allowing the force of her response to carry her with it, she reached a peak and the incredible waves of pleasure gathered her up and threw her down again on the other side. In a daze she floated back to earth again.

Cesario was watching her with dark, dark eyes when she recovered her senses again and his hand was closed over one of hers, his body hot and damp and intimately masculine against her thigh. She looked back at him with light eyes that still reflected some of her wonderment at what had just transpired. His strong jaw line squared.

‘Don’t look at me like that. Don’t forget our agreement,’ he breathed suddenly, his keen gaze narrowed on her feverishly flushed face. ‘I didn’t ask for your love and I don’t want it. We will share a bed, nothing more, until a child is born, piccola mia.’

It was like an unanticipated slap in the face for Jess and she went straight into shock, recognising that he, of all men, would recognise when a woman might be getting a little too attached, a little too serious. Her facial muscles tightened, her expression carefully schooled to blankness as a wave of anger and pain broke inside her like a tide crashing on the shore. She would not give him the satisfaction of knowing that he had hit pay-dirt with that cold-blooded warning. She would not respond with the angry resentment that would reveal that he had wounded her.

‘I don’t have love to give you,’ Jess fielded flatly as she deliberately shifted away from him, rejecting that deceptive togetherness for the pretence that it so clearly was. ‘I love my family and my pets and some day I will love my child, but I’m afraid that’s it. I am a very sensible person when it comes to my emotions.’

A slight darkening of skin tone over his cheekbones hinted that she might have touched him on the raw. He screened his gaze and murmured levelly, ‘I just don’t want you to be hurt.’

‘I’m strong, much stronger than you seem to think,’ Jess countered, and then, in a tone of polite enquiry calculated to underline that declaration for his benefit, ‘Are you staying here for the night? Or do we sleep separately?’

Cesario sat up as though she had elbowed him in the ribs. ‘My room is next door.’

‘Goodnight,’ Jess told him sweetly.

‘Buone notte, ben dorme…sleep well,’ he breathed, springing out of the bed, pausing only to pick up his clothes before he vanished through the connecting door.

Sleep well? Jess might almost have laughed at that piece of advice until she cried. She freshened up with a shower in the superb adjoining bathroom, went downstairs briefly to take care of her dogs and then finally crawled back into bed, the slight persistent ache at the very heart of her as much a reminder of what had changed in her life as the lingering scent of his cologne and his body on the pillow beside hers. Breathing that aroma in, she groaned out loud and shut him out of her head.

Her thoughts came in a kind of vague shorthand because she was blocking out so much of what she was feeling and denying the pained sense of loneliness, loss and rejection she was experiencing. Her husband had introduced her to sex. He was good at sex and she was very lucky that that was so, she told herself determinedly. He had tried to pretend that theirs was a normal marriage but he had lied. He didn’t want her to care about him. But she was a proud and clever woman and she would respect his warning. She would not make the foolish mistake of falling in love with a man who’d made it clear from the outset that he could never love her back.

She also wondered dully if it was true that he was still in love with Alice. That would give him a very good reason to make a marriage of convenience in an effort to produce the heir he required to gain legal title to his family home. If he was already in love with another woman, a businesslike arrangement was his only real hope.

Jess told herself that it made no odds to her whether or not Cesario loved another woman. Such subtleties, such secrets, were beyond her remit and immaterial in terms of a marriage already openly acknowledged to be one of pure practicality. Why should she give a hoot if he cherished another woman in his heart? On that challenging thought, sheer mental and physical exhaustion dragged Jess down into a deep, dreamless sleep…

CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_e370957c-a6c2-5f6a-a12c-6bd55fea28dc)

CESARIO was suffering from an appalling headache. He had taken his medication but it had yet to kick in. Actually, he wanted a drink, but knew that alcohol was a bad idea with powerful painkillers. He massaged his brow and tried to loosen his taut neck muscles while studiously endeavouring to suppress all the negative thoughts threatening his equilibrium. He had been warned about headaches and this was as bad as he had been promised: so far, so normal…

He knew his bride thought that he was a cold, callous bastard, but he had said what he’d had to say and drawn a necessary line in the sand. He didn’t want her on his conscience. He didn’t want to hurt her either. It struck him as strange that he had not foreseen that possibility before he married her. Was he really so single-minded and selfish that he had not considered the damage he might inflict? Evidently, he was.

Determined to stay grounded, he reminded himself that the marriage was a project, a business agreement and little more. His bride might seem vulnerable and naïve, but it would be unwise to overlook the fact that he had paid a fat price for her services when he accepted the loss of that painting and dropped the chance to prosecute her father. And obviously he wanted Jessica to find pleasure in his bed, since it might well take months for a conception to take place. The big seduction scene that he had unintentionally staged could only have been motivated by subconscious common sense, he reasoned grimly. It was then that he got himself the stiff drink he knew he shouldn’t have and still lay awake until dawn broke the skies.

The following morning Jessica awoke to the chink of china rattling and sat up to be served breakfast in bed on a tray complete with a linen napkin and a pretty flower in a bud vase. So, this was what it was like to be spoiled, she thought ruefully, pushing her wild tumble of black curls out of her eyes as the smiling maid chattering in broken English opened the curtains and threw open the doors onto the balcony, inviting in fresh air and sunshine. Jess discovered that she was ravenous and she washed down pancakes and fresh fruit with juice and cappuccino coffee.

A slim figure in floral shorts and an emerald green T-shirt, her black curls bouncing on her shoulders, she descended the stairs. A door stood open wide onto a rear courtyard and, with a hail of excited barks and yelps, her doggy posse came charging through it. All her pets, with the exception of Weed, were present, and as she straightened from her greeting session Cesario appeared in a doorway, Weed lurking shyly to one side of him.

Self-conscious, Jess tensed and tried not to stare but it was a tough challenge. Cesario was less formally clad than she had ever seen him, in a casual shirt that clung to his wide shoulders and powerful chest and linen trousers that accentuated the long muscular strength of his legs and the lean tautness of his hips. But while informal it was still cutting-edge Italian designer style he sported, and his ruffled black hair and the shadow of stubble round his handsome mouth only roughened the edges of his usual perfect grooming to ensure that he looked even more masculine and sexy than he normally did.

Her mouth ran dry, the colour in her cheeks heightening as she briefly relived the intensity of her pleasure with him the night before and her tummy flipped, her legs trembling below her.

‘Where have you been, Weed?’ she asked her stray pet, concentrating her attention on him because it was safer than focusing too much on the sleek predator by his side.

‘He just wandered in and went to sleep under my desk,’ Cesario told her with a shrug that disclaimed all responsibility for the development.

‘My goodness, you start work early! I’d better go and feed the dogs…’

‘They’ve already been fed. I employ a dog handler in my security team and he’s been taking care of the practicalities.’

Taken aback by that assurance, Jess gave him a disarmingly natural grin. ‘I can’t get over the novelty of having people do things for me—I mean, breakfast in bed, what a treat!’

‘Every day can be a treat for you now,’ Cesario murmured, enchanted against his will by that sudden flashing smile that lit up her oval face. During the night he had thought about the knife attack she had mentioned. Belatedly recalling what had surely been a defensive wound on her hand, he had wanted to know the whole story, but he was reluctant to risk traumatising her by asking her to satisfy his curiosity. She had said she might have died and then he would never have known her. His lean strong face shadowed as he forced that gloomy thought out.

‘No, I don’t like being spoiled. I’m not helpless and I’m too used to doing things for myself,’ Jess fielded briskly, suddenly wanting and needing to hold onto what was familiar lest her life become subsumed entirely by his.

‘You’re on your honeymoon.’

Her nose wrinkled. ‘Call it a holiday, not a honeymoon. By no stretch of the imagination could we be like a honeymoon couple,’ she pointed out drily.

‘What I said last night wasn’t meant to offend you,’ Cesario drawled. ‘It was intended to—’

‘Save you the hassle of dealing with a lovesick bride who wants to hang onto you a few months down the road?’ Jess trilled quick as a flash. ‘Relax, that’s not going to happen. I’ll be looking forward to getting my freedom and my own life back.’

For a split second Cesario looked as though he might have been about to argue with that assessment, but then he closed his handsome mouth, watching her with screened liquid dark eyes that gave away nothing. Jess, however, had few illusions about the warning she had received the night before. The very fact she was still a virgin had probably given him commitment-phobia. She was, after all, dealing with a man accustomed to women who fell madly in love with him and his lifestyle and then were reluctant to let go of him and the luxury again. But she had no intention of becoming one of that undistinguished crowd. Jess had fought many a fight against poor odds in her life and had emerged triumphant. There was nothing of the loser in her genes. Hopefully she would walk away from Cesario di Silvestri with a child, but only because that was her choice as well as his, she told herself fiercely.

‘So, how do we spend the first day of this holiday?’ Jess enquired brightly.