It Started With A Proposition: Blackmailed into the Italian's Bed / Contract with Consequences / The Passion Price

The evidence of his eyes was troubling. She looked tired, and stressed, and frustrated. If she did have a live-in lover—or a boyfriend—he wasn’t making her very happy.

‘So there’s no special man in your life right now?’ he asked.

She glanced away for a second, then looked back at him. ‘Not right now. Look, I—’

‘Would you dance with me?’ he asked, before she could bolt for the door.

The band had started up again, a bluesy number with a slow, sensual rhythm.

Jordan stared at him. But not so much with anger now. With a type of fear, as if he’d just asked someone scared of heights to step with him to the edge of a cliff.

Maybe she thought he was coming on to her.

He wasn’t. He just wanted to find some way to get past her defences, to have her open up to him about her life.

She was a good dancer, he knew, but so was he. They’d loved going dancing together.

‘For old times’ sake,’ he added, standing up and holding his hand out to her.

She stared at it for a long moment, as if it was a viper about to strike.

Finally she rose, taking off her jacket and draping it over her bag on the chair before placing her hand in his.

How soft it was, he thought as he drew her onto the polished wooden dance floor. Soft and pale, with long, elegant fingers and exquisitely kept nails.

She’d always had a thing for painted nails, he recalled. Both fingers and toes. Her favourite colour had been scarlet, but she’d had bottles and bottles of nail polish, of every imaginable shade.

Tonight her fingernails were painted a deep cream, matching her blouse.

Now that her jacket was off, he could see she still had a lovely figure, despite being thinner: her breasts were still pert, her waist was tinier than ever, and her stomach athletically flat.

His mother would have said she didn’t have good childbearing hips—the way Italian girls did—but Gino had always found Jordan’s slender shape extremely attractive. He loved her tight little butt and her long slim legs, loved her blonde hair and her pale soft skin.

Naked, she looked like an angel.

‘Put your arms up around my neck,’ he suggested, after he swung her round to face him.

‘You always were a bossy man,’ she replied, but did as he wanted, her fingertips like velvet as they slid under the collar of his leather jacket and settled on the sensitive skin at the nape of his neck.

Gino swallowed when he started to respond. This was not what he’d intended when he’d asked her to dance. But he seemed powerless to stop himself from becoming excited.

Planting his hands on her hips, he kept his lower half a decent distance from hers—not an easy thing to do once she started swaying to the slow, thudding beat of the music.

His good intentions, Gino suspected, were doomed to failure.

‘You are real, aren’t you?’ she said suddenly. ‘Not some figment of my imagination.’

‘I’m very real,’ he said drily. Just as his arousal was.

Her head tipped charmingly to one side as she looked up at him.

‘Amazing,’ she murmured. ‘And you’re not fat at all.’

He tried not to laugh. If only she knew…

‘Why would I be fat?’ he asked.

‘Lots of men gain weight after they turn thirty. What are you now? Thirty-five?’

‘Thirty-six. You’ve lost weight.’

‘A little.’

‘You’re still very beautiful.’

Her eyes stabbed his with reproach. ‘Don’t, Gino.’

‘Don’t what?’

‘Don’t sweet-talk me.’

‘You used to like me sweet-talking you.’

‘I used to like you doing a lot of things.’

He wished she hadn’t said that. Her words were sparking memories which would have been better kept buried.

And they in turn sparked something he’d been trying to deny all day, struggled to control ever since he’d asked her to dance. Which was that he still wanted her—despite the years which had passed, despite everything. He wanted to take her upstairs to his hotel room right now and strip her of those sexless clothes, wanted to take down her hair and just take her, as he had ten years ago.

She’d been a virgin back then, a fact he hadn’t realised till it was too late. Her innocence had shocked him at the time, but her passion had quickly banished any qualms.

That passion was still there: he could see it in her blazing blue eyes and flushed cheeks.

And it was still overriding his conscience.

‘Some things don’t change,’ he growled.

‘Everything changes, Gino. Nothing stays the same.’

‘Is that so?’

His hands shifted, one sliding up her spine, the other downward to her tailbone, giving him the leverage to press her close.

As their bodies made more intimate contact a wave of dark desire ripped through Gino, obliterating what little was left of his conscience.

‘This hasn’t changed, beautiful,’ he whispered huskily.

CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_b8127042-f5c9-537d-beef-126c4c761d5c)