A Dangerous Solace

He turned around and for a moment they simply looked at one another.

As she began to walk slowly up to him he wondered what had become of his determination never to let life take him by surprise again. His mouth ran dry, his body did what was natural when faced with this much woman. Because, Dio mio, she was a sight to make a man glad Adam had had a rib.

She’d obviously gone to some trouble in the transformation department.

It wasn’t a stretch to assume it was all for him.

He ran his eye from the erotic promise of her mouth to her decadent bosom and then to the dainty ultra-feminine shoes clasping her feet. No wonder.

The shirt and trousers she’d been hiding beneath this morning hadn’t advertised a shape that could only be fully appreciated by an Italian male—generous curves thrown into relief by the accent of her narrow waist.

This was the shape he’d discovered when he’d finally parted her from the puffy blue dress.

She was a walking fantasy if your tastes ran to Gina Lollobrigida.

His did. He’d had a poster of her on the wall of the room he’d kept at his grandparents’ villa outside Positano. Part of the pleasure of summer breaks from the military academy he’d been bricked up in by his indifferent parents had been getting back to that house, to his kind old grandparents, but also to Gina.

Almost at once the full force of the past swung in. She wasn’t the girl who had lain with him in the grass on the Palatino. That girl had never really existed. And now any trace of her was gone.

As she approached, the low lights of the square illumined her eyes and he glimpsed uncertainty and something else—hopefulness.

But it must have been a trick of the light, because she lifted her chin and her green eyes clashed like an army of the night with his.

There was a dark sort of satisfaction in the knowledge that she had come after him, and it cautioned him to wait and see what she would do.

At the same time he saw what else he’d missed. A huddle of paparazzo across the square. In a second they’d focus in on him, and in this mood the last thing he wanted was a mob of jackals around him.

As excuses went, it wasn’t a bad one.

Asserting the cool, dominant masculinity which got him what he wanted in most situations, he stepped up to her, hooked his arm around her waist and told himself this had nothing to do with what he wanted but rather was necessity.

‘Scusi, signora,’ he murmured, as if apologising for blocking her path, and in the next instant he was kissing her.

He spread his hand at the base of her neck and held her in place, aware this was incredibly intrusive...and undeniably very erotic as she wriggled frantically against him. He clamped his other hand on her wide shifting bottom.

It was still thumping through him exactly who this girl was when he began to enjoy her struggle. He wanted her fists to thump against his chest, her fury at being restrained to come out. Come on, cara, let’s see if you can get away this time.

He was fiercely turned on, not only by his thoughts but by the feel of her. Her body was so blatantly female every movement of it against his was virtually X-rated. The scent of night-blooming jasmine seemed to be everywhere. His mouth took hers again and then again, until hard and aching he forced himself to release her. All he could see were those bright, astonished green eyes, the curve of her upper lip pinpricked with tiny beads of perspiration, and lower the heaving of her bosom. Instantly he wanted to pull her in tight again, for the press of her warm curvy body that fitted him so perfectly.

In a world of women for whom high heels merely put them on stilts, failing to give them the length in their bodies he needed, he had one in his arms who was built to the perfect scale for a man like him—a little over six feet, with generous hips pressed to cradle his, her breasts soft and full against his chest.

He knew they’d been seen. So he bent his head close to hers. From any sort of distance it was an intimate gesture.

Her green eyes flew to his. Astonishment had given way to fury. It wasn’t just in her expression, it was in the aggressive tilt of her body. She was literally seething, and the female pheromones hit him hard and fast, tightening his body into the kind of surging lust he had been careful to keep in check on that long-ago night.

She had been so uncertain. He hadn’t wanted to overwhelm her...

But she wasn’t that girl any more. She was the woman who had run out on him... And he wanted her any way he could get her right now. Down a dark alley, working up her skirt, tearing her tights, teaching her who was in charge. She didn’t run from him. Ever.

Gianluca could hear his own harsh breathing.

Why was she pretending not to know him? What had she been doing, walking into the bar dressed like this? What kind of woman was she? The kind who indulged in anonymous couplings with strangers and never looked back? Why in the hell was she back in his life now? What exactly had he walked into?

He glanced in the direction of the paparazzi.

Lust and anger mingled in a disturbing cocktail. What had happened to the cool pragmatic man of his reputation?

He looked down at her, reclaimed the higher ground.

‘Scusi, signorina.’ The irony in his scraped-down voice was clear, but his code of honour meant he must say it. ‘Mi volevi dire nulla di male.’

He meant her no harm.

No, no harm. He wanted to kill her.

* * *

Overwhelmed, shocked by the sudden proximity of a big, immeasurably strong male bearing down on her, Ava struggled to make sense of what had just happened even as she instinctively cleaved her body to his.

She should back away now. This was highly imprudent and anything between them couldn’t possibly end well. Now was her chance. He wouldn’t ask any questions. She was still a stranger to him.

But she hadn’t over-exaggerated the memory of the effect of this man on her senses. There had to have been something on that night so long ago that had made her throw all caution to the wind, and now she knew.

She suspected it had something to do with his dark adamantine voice, with that sexy, drawling Italian accent running so softly through everything he said, making her a little bit wild. If she closed her eyes she could feel his mouth trailing the softest butterfly kisses down the centre of her body as if anointing her. Nobody had ever touched her that way before or since.

‘Signora?’

Her eyes fluttered open. He was looking down at her with a hot intensity that liquefied her very bones and with something else—something dark and terrifying.

‘Signorina,’ she answered in a strangled voice. ‘Remember, I’m not married.’

He actually reared back slightly, before his eyes narrowed thoughtfully on her.

For a moment neither spoke, and then his half-lidded golden gaze flared out of the darkness at her.

‘Can you run in those shoes?’

‘S-sorry?’ That wasn’t what she had expected to hear.

‘Those men over there are paparazzo. If they recognise me your photograph will be in all kinds of places you don’t want it to be. Can you run in those shoes?’

He didn’t wait for her response. He pulled her in against him, one hand on the small of her back, and began walking her fast across the square, back the way they’d come.

Ava knew she should be protesting, or at least asking more questions, but she felt oddly buoyant—furious with him one moment, swept up in excitement the next. And, really, what was she supposed to do when he was just whisking her along with him?

She thought fleetingly of the nearby Trevi Fountain and how in another life she should be there with Bernard right now, pretending to be in an old Hollywood film as he slid the ring she had chosen onto her finger. The thought of how wrong that scenario was on every level floored her. What had she been thinking?

Ava glanced up at this man’s profile, at the hard lines speaking of an aggressive masculinity that took what it wanted.