A Vengeful Passion

Shocked and winded by the merciless speed of his response, she clashed with glittering golden eyes. The collision left her breathless. The final token struggle, she conceded dully, was over. Not surprisingly, she had lost. She had never won many points with Vito. If she was strong-willed and stubborn, Vito was doubly so. With a knife at his throat, Vito would disdain retreat. His temperament was as fiery as her own but his was controlled by the cool of intellect, not by passion. And in any confrontation he would always triumph on the ruthless edge of that streak of cruelty that was uniquely his. And now it seemed that he had her precisely where he had always wanted her…absolutely and irrevocably within his power.

Abruptly her thought-train was broken by the awareness that Vito had not yet freed her from his hold. Forced into rawly intimate acquaintance with every sleek, hard angle of his lean, muscular length, she attempted to edge out of reach. An imprisoning hand splayed across her hipbone, reinforcing the physical contact she was suddenly desperate to avoid.

‘Leave me alone!’ she demanded wildly.

Ruthless fingers knotted and twisted into the tangled fall of her hair, tipping her head back.

‘You’re behaving like an—’

‘An aroused male?’ Vito vented a low-pitched laugh that did something inexcusable to the level of support offered by her knees. ‘But I am. Very aroused.’

‘V-Vito…no!’ But he had already pressed his mouth hotly to the tiny pulse flickering wildly in the hollow of her throat and she moaned, beginning to tremble like someone caught unexpectedly in a violent storm. Somewhere in the bemused reaches of her brain she was recalling that she had this one weak spot where Vito was concerned. When he touched her…oh, God, when he touched her! The tip of his tongue delved provocatively between her mutinously closed lips and withdrew again.

A choked whimper broke low in her throat, sudden raw and delicious tension of a different kind jerking her every muscle tight, driving every single rational thought from her swimming head.

Involuntarily her whole body was reaching up and out, reacting to the lure of an anticipation that dug painful claws of need into her flesh. Slowly, unbearably slowly, so that her hands clutched pleadingly at his broad shoulders, he brought his mouth down to the now opened invitation of hers.

He kissed the same way he made love: with fire and passion and unholy sexual intensity. Her every skin cell came alive in one gigantic whoosh of feeling. Her skin was clammy, her breasts were swelling and her nipples were pinching into aching tightness. Liquidity ran in a river of drowning weakness through her limbs and she would have sagged if he hadn’t been holding her upright. For long timeless moments, she was in a hot, swirling darkness where only the primitive demands of her own body held sway. He moved against her, lithely erotic as a jungle cat, letting her feel the thrusting evidence of his masculinity. She gave up on the unequal fight and folded into the heat and hardness of him, abandoning herself to the savage potency of his hunger as he swept her off her feet and carried her out of the room.

‘Take the rest of the day off.’

She heard that. She heard him speaking to someone. That penetrated the haze of passion even as she registered that Vito sounded most unlike his usual cool, controlled self. Some physical sense of where she was penetrated as he brought her down on some unyielding horizontal surface, and her eyes flew wide open, trained to his darkly handsome face above hers, taut and flushed and determined with the force of a hunger she too well understood.