Jemima looked up at him, scanning the dark golden eyes that inexplicably turned her insides to mush and made her knees boneless. As he lowered his head her breath caught in her throat and her pupils dilated. Without warning his arms went round her, possessive hands delving down her spine to splay across the ripe swell of her hips and haul her close. His mouth crashed down on hers with hungry force and in the space of a heartbeat she travelled from consternation to satisfaction. That kiss was what she really wanted, what her body mysteriously craved.
He kissed her and the world swam out of focus and her brain shut down and suppressed all the anxious thoughts that had been tormenting her. It was simultaneously everything she most wanted and everything she most feared. To be shot from ordinary planet earth into the dazzling orbit of passion and need by a single kiss was what she had always dreamt of finding in a man’s arms, but Luciano was by no stretch of the imagination the male she had pictured in such a role. After all, Luciano wasn’t for real. She might be inexperienced but she wasn’t stupid and she knew that sex would only be a game with him and that he would only play with her without any intention of offering anything worthwhile. A woman needed a tough heart to play such games as an equal and she knew she wasn’t up to that challenge.
‘You want me,’ Luciano grated against her red swollen mouth, his breath warming her cheek and bringing the faint scent of alcohol to her awareness.
Jemima shivered violently against the unyielding confines of his lean, muscular body. She loved the strength and hardness of his well-honed frame. Even through their clothes she could feel him hot and ready against her and the tight ache at the heart of her was like a strangling knot that yearned for freedom. The taste of his mouth was still on hers, nerve cells jangling with the longing for a repeat and the erotic plunge of his tongue. With a receptive shudder that signified the strength the gesture demanded, she brought up her hands and pressed against his broad chest to drive some space between them.
‘No, not like this,’ she mumbled gruffly, fighting herself as much as she was fighting his attraction.
She wanted him. He was right about that. She had never wanted anything or anybody as much as she wanted Luciano at that moment. Pulling free of him, stepping back, physically hurt as unsated cravings set up a drumbeat of angry dissatisfaction throughout her quivering body. Kicking off the silly shoes that limited her mobility was the work of seconds and her sudden loss of height disconcerted him into lifting his arms off her in surprise. Ducking out of reach and barefoot, Jemima darted round him and pelted out of the door as though baying hounds were chasing her.
Black brows pleating, Luciano swept up the abandoned shoes and looked at them incredulously. Did she think she was Cinderella or something? In bewilderment, because a woman had never before treated him to such stop-go tactics, he poured himself another stiff drink. He didn’t get it. He really didn’t understand why she was running away. Why would she do that? What possible benefit could she hope to attain by infuriating him?
And then the proverbial penny dropped and he wondered why he had not immediately grasped her strategy. After all, it was an exceedingly basic strategy: she wanted more. In fact Jemima or Julie or whatever she and her late twin had chosen to call themselves had been born wanting more. And she knew he was rich enough to deliver a lot more. Only he wouldn’t, Luciano thought angrily, stoking up his resentment and his hostility. He was determined not to further reward a woman who had lied and schemed to make a profit out of his infant son as though he were a product on sale to the highest bidder.
BREATHLESS, JEMIMA LEANT back against the door she had slammed behind her in her haste to reach her bedroom. Well, so much for turning down the gift of the clothes with charm and diplomacy! Hadn’t that gone well? She grimaced and groaned out loud. Why did she make such a mess of everything with Luciano? What happened to her brain? What happened to tact? Why had she kissed him back as though her life depended on it? Resisting him, acting repulsed would have kept him at bay, but instead she had encouraged him.
The trouble was, she thought ruefully, nobody had ever made her feel as Luciano Vitale did. When she was at college before she’d begun seeing Steven, plenty of men had tried to get her into bed. In fact being constantly badgered for sex had put her off dating. Ironically, though, she had not set out to still be virtually untouched at the age of almost twenty-four. Her parents might believe that she should remain a virgin until she married but Jemima had focused on a more attainable goal. She had believed that she would retain her virginity until she met someone she loved and she had believed she loved Steven, but Steven had seemed to prize her virginal state even more than her parents and had insisted that they should respect church teaching and wait until they were man and wife. Yet how quickly he had abandoned that conviction when true temptation had come along in the guise of her much sexier sister, she reflected wryly.
‘You can’t turn your back on true love,’ Steven had told her self-righteously before he had gone off with her twin. ‘Julie’s the perfect woman for me.’
But Jemima couldn’t tell herself the same thing about Luciano, not least because she didn’t believe that he was perfect. He was arrogant and domineering and too rich and powerful for his own good. Yet she was madly, wildly and irrationally attracted to him. In addition she respected his sincere affection for Nicky. She also liked Luciano on a level she couldn’t quite explain even to herself, for she did not know where that liking had come from or on what she based it. In the same way, when Luciano was angry and exasperated as he had been earlier she automatically wanted to make everything better for him and improve his mood. Why she felt like that she didn’t know because common sense warned her that Luciano was wrong for her in every possible way. They were too different as people.
Sex was a pursuit in itself for Luciano, an amusement and not necessarily part of a meaningful relationship. Yet he had done commitment in the past. He had been married and a father before she’d even met him and at a relatively young age, Jemima reminded herself, and that suggested that while Luciano might have the reputation of being a womaniser he had always had a deeper and more caring side to his nature.
Across the room, a door opened and she glanced up. Luciano, his jacket and tie discarded, strolled towards her in his shirtsleeves.
‘What on earth are you doing in here?’ Jemima exclaimed in consternation.
‘Finding you. You ran away,’ Luciano condemned. ‘Have you any idea how irritating that is?’
‘You were being too pushy.’
‘I’m naturally pushy.’
‘That’s not an acceptable excuse.’
‘You were trying to pretend you don’t want me,’ Luciano reminded her with a sudden edge of accusation. ‘That was an outright lie!’
‘It’s arrogant to be so full of yourself.’
Luciano shrugged a broad shoulder sheathed in smooth cotton. ‘I’m not the modest type and I know when I’m wanted.’
And he would have had plenty of practice in that line, Jemima reckoned, scanning his lean, dark, flawless features and the intoxicating whole of his fallen angel beauty, which knocked her for six every time she looked at him. That was so superficial of her, she scolded herself, but when she was gazing at Luciano her brain could not concentrate on anything else. In any case her body hummed like an engine raring to go in his radius, making it difficult for her to breathe or move, never mind think.
‘Perhaps you’re waiting for me to offer you a villa or an apartment in Palermo or Rome or Paris...a less temporary and more rewarding position in my life?’ Luciano suggested smooth as glass.
‘Why would I want you to offer me a villa or an apartment?’ Jemima asked him in genuine bewilderment.
‘A mistress has some security. A casual lover has none,’ Luciano pointed out.
‘I really don’t know what we’re talking about here. I thought mistresses died out with corsets,’ she