She saw the flame in his eyes and raised herself onto tiptoe, then slanted her mouth softly across his. As she began to pull away he released a low imprecation and, grabbing the back of her head, ground his mouth into hers. Kissing her as though he’d drain the life from her.
Lips attached, they sank entwined to the mossy floor.
A silence punctuated by soft gasps and hoarse gasps pulsed as the trees stood silent witness as they feverishly tore at each other’s clothes until they lay hot bare flesh to hot bare flesh.
Gianfranco covered one hardened nipple with his mouth, causing her slender back to arch as deep darts of pleasure penetrated to the very core of her. He kissed his way down her belly as his fingers explored the soft curls at the apex of her legs before sliding deeper into her.
Feeling as though she were drowning in erotic pleasure, Dervla slid her fingers across the sweat-slick golden contours of his hard, smooth shoulders. ‘Now, please!’ she begged. ‘Oh, my God, Gianfranco, why are you so damned good at this?’ she groaned as he responded willingly to her plea.
‘Look at me!’ he commanded thickly as he filled her, sinking deep into her heat. ‘I want to see your face.’ His own face was flushed, the skin drawn tight against the strong planes and hollows of his bone structure.
Their eyes were sealed as tightly as their bodies as they moved together, both silent but for tortured breathing until a low, almost feral cry of pleasure was torn from Dervla’s lips as the first wave of release hit her.
At almost the same moment she felt him pulse hotly inside her.
Stretched out lazily on the mossy floor, Gianfranco watched, one hand beneath his head, as she began to dress. Arms twisted behind her back, balanced on one leg, Dervla struggled clumsily with the clasp on her bra.
He responded to the wave of tenderness that hit him with his usual mantra of, It’s just lust, a purely sexual thing, and wondered as he rode out the wave how much shelf-life that particular rationalisation had?
‘You could help.’
‘My expertise lies in removing undergarments. Besides, you really don’t need that thing, pretty though it is,’ he conceded. ‘I prefer you free and unfettered, especially under a silk blouse.’
‘You mean I’m flat-chested,’ Dervla snapped, pretending outrage as she tore her blouse from his fingers. Actually marriage to Gianfranco had cured her of any insecurities she had about her body; he enjoyed it and had taught her to do the same.
Gianfranco laughed. ‘Hardly that, cara! You fit in my hands just perfectly,’ he reminded her, extending one hand and flexing his fingers suggestively to demonstrate the fit.
She turned her head quickly, but not before he had seen the hot fiery rush of colour to her cheeks. That she could blush now when he could still taste her on his lips, when he knew every inch of her body better than he knew his own, made him grin. ‘You’re blushing.’
Dervla tossed back her red hair and turned, fastening her shirt as it settled in wild rippling curls around her shoulders. ‘You just like to torment me,’ she charged reproachfully.
His eyes slid to her smooth, high cleavage as he levered himself upright in one fluid motion. With one hand he smoothed back her hair from her face before planting a warm, lingering kiss on her parted lips.
‘It only seems fair, cara,’ he husked, ‘as you torment me.’
It was true, though the urgency of his desire had ebbed, it was never far away when he looked at her or even thought of her. He had never known anything like it.
‘What are you thinking?’ he asked, studying her face with the unnerving intensity that always made her feel he could see into her head and read her thoughts.
Dervla shook her head. ‘I was just thinking …’ She watched through her lashes, her attention drifting as he fastened the belt across his slim hips and began to button his shirt across his flat, muscle-ridged belly. ‘It’s just all this—’
The expressive sweep of her slim arm took in the Tuscan landscape, of rolling hills dotted with olive groves and the sensitively and expensively restored palazzo, which, with the exception of a few years when Gianfranco’s father had lost it in a poker game, had been in his family since the fifteenth century.
A year ago life had been much simpler. She had been a nurse, philosophical about the fact that there was no way she could afford to get on the property ladder in London.
Now she was mistress of this vast estate and several other luxurious homes across Europe including a London Georgian town house complete with the obligatory underground pool and leisure complex, and wife of the powerful enigmatic man who earned the billions for their upkeep.
‘It’s so far away from my old life.’
There had been so many changes in the past year that sometimes when she caught sight of her reflection in a mirror Dervla hardly recognised the woman reflected there, and she wasn’t talking designer outfits!
The changes went much deeper.
But then she hadn’t actually had much choice but to adapt when she’d found herself plunged into a totally alien environment and dramatically out of her comfort zone. She’d had to develop a few new skills to cope.
And she had.
A year ago she would have laughed hysterically at the suggestion that she had the ability to get a children’s hospice—funded by the charitable trust funded by Gianfranco’s financial empire—from the drawing-board stage to bricks-and-mortar reality.
Similarly she would have had a panic attack at the notion that she could attend and, even more scary, host glittering events where the guests could be as diverse as politicians, Hollywood royalty and the real thing—who ever knew there were so many princes in Europe?
Maybe some of Gianfranco’s—not entirely realistic in her view—confidence in her ability to do whatever he threw at her had rubbed off, because she had done both.
And become a stepmother.
A small frown puckered the smooth skin of her brow as her thoughts turned to her stepson, whom she adored.
That might have been the biggest challenge of all if Alberto had displayed even the remotest resentment of her, his new stepmother, or if Gianfranco had made it quite clear on the one occasion she had found herself in the middle of a father-son tussle that when it came to his son he made the decisions.
She had forgotten what the minor disagreement had been about, but not his words when he had referred to the incident when they were in private.
‘There has been just Alberto and me for a long time now … what we have works.’
Dervla’s admiration was sincere. ‘I know you’re a great father. I was only—’
‘I will not have you undermining my authority with my son, Dervla.’
‘I wasn’t trying to—’
He brushed aside her protest with an impatient motion of his hand. ‘Children,’ he told her, apparently unaware of the insult he had offered her, ‘need continuity.’
‘You mean children are permanent and wives are temporary.’
His irritation was written clear in his steely stare as he retorted coldly, ‘If you wish to put it that way.’
She hid her hurt behind aggression. ‘You put it that way.’
His careless shrug made her resentment spill over into an unwise—she knew it the moment it left her lips—reference to his dead first wife.
‘I don’t suppose you told Alberto’s